 Coming up on D T N S, what I fix it found inside the M one max spoiler and M one, a robot that does drywall and Patrick Norton's hopes for a holiday hardware. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 20th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the shows producer Roger Shane and joining us host of a VXL Patrick Norton is back. Welcome back Patrick. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Very good to have you. Thank you for bringing a holiday spirit to our rundown today. You're welcome. Sorry. I was like, is that a obscure cat reference? I'm like, no, he's talking about holiday shopping. If you want to know what the real cat reference is, you got to get good day internet. We had a guest appearance from Patrick's cat. We were also talking about all kinds of other things regarding home maintenance and more. Get that become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. We have a birthday to celebrate happy 35th birthday to Windows, which launched its first version on November 20th, 1985. So Windows now old enough to run for president. Windows in 2024, everybody present day. Microsoft is extending friends and family features from Microsoft Teams mobile to include its web and desktop version as well. Anybody with a Microsoft account can host up to 300 people for up to 24 hours at no charge. And you don't even need a Microsoft account to join that call. The prime minister granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to enforce data localization rules and block content deemed harmful. The Asia Internet Coalition or AIC has warned that its members may have to stop doing business in Pakistan if these new rules are enforced as written. The AIC includes Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, SAP, Airbnb, Rocket and Cloudflare line and a whole lot more. Over in Vietnam, Reuters sources say the Vietnamese government is threatening to shut down Facebook. If it does not agree to further censor local political content beyond what Facebook agreed to do in April. Well, Apple's rumored, augmented or mixed reality headset is not a real thing yet. Mike Rockwell, Apple's head of AR and Alessandra McGinnis, Apple's senior product manager for AR, tell CNET that Apple's mission right now is through that device you already have in your pocket. That's that device, the iPhone, of course. Apple says there are already 10,000 AR enabled iOS apps from 7,000 developers, many of which focus on shopping and home improvements. And, and yes, Android people, we know you don't have one in your pocket. That's not, following a Financial Times report that Amazon is laying off a number of people working on its internal drone delivery project. Amazon confirmed that it is shrinking its internal team and working with independent contractors. FACC Aerospace from Austria and Air Nova Aerospace from Spain, both component manufacturers are the first to partner with Amazon to help finally make that 60 minutes segment about prime air a reality with drones depositing small Amazon packages on people's front yards. The FAA granted Amazon approval to begin testing its concept earlier this year. All right, let's talk a little bit about those new MacBooks. I fix it. Got their hands on one. They did. The anticipated tear down of the M1 based MacBook Air and MacBook Pro from iFixit has happened. This is what iFixit does, and they've done it again. So here are some of the interesting takeaways that they found. First of all, almost nothing has changed inside except that M1 chip looks pretty similar. Otherwise, among the few things that have changed, the air doesn't have a fan and neither laptop, not the air nor the MacBook Pro has the T2 chip. The T2 function is handled by the M1 chip's secure enclave. The M1 MacBook Pro does have a fan. It's just the air that doesn't have a fan and is the exact same fan as the one in the previous generation. So theoretically, your previous gen MacBook could run as quietly as the M1 if it weren't for that chip and the M1's unified memory architecture means no upgradeable RAM. Some people have mumbled and grumbled about this. Two 8 gigabyte SK Hynex LPDDR4X chips are integrated into the M1, meaning that all parts of the CPU, including the neural engine and the GPU, can access the same memory pool without having to cache the data elsewhere, how they can get away with, you know, less RAM. Overall, the parts being the same means repairability still low. That was a sticking point for a lot of folks, not any better now. I fix it points out that the M1 chip being used in both laptops, the air and the pro could have meant interchangeable parts between the two models. Alas, that does not happen. Patrick, how do you feel about this? I want to have kind of given up on the repairability from a lot of Apple products, just as a lifestyle choice, I get less angry. Two, I'm actually still blown away by the efficiencies they've picked up by stuffing everything on the single die. I'm still kind of, you know, I think obsessed would be the word with that. Also really pissed that they don't have any 16 gigabyte models. I've had no interest to own a Mac right up until I started looking at some of the performance and battery life and lack of fan. And I was like, oh, those sound really nice. Yeah, even with just 16 gigabytes, the amount of efficiency they get from including it from integrating it into the chip is pretty amazing. It was weird to see those two oblong gram sticks just sitting on the chip, basically, in the iFix at Teardown. It's weird. Yeah, it kind of makes you want to go in there and rip them off, although I don't recommend anyone do that. I know a friend of mine, I would invite to do that, but that's beyond my soldering skills by a long stretch of the imagination. I will add that it is unified memory. So that 16 gigs covers both video and CPU. So whatever fits, hopefully, the optimized whatever code that you run on it. But I mean, I still amazing what they managed to pull off. Yeah, yeah, there was one interview with Apple people today that that quoted them being absolutely giddy. I think this is performed better than even they expected, frankly. There was a it was interesting. During Fireball did a write up about his hands-on experience and he quoted an Apple engineer. So an NS object, which is kind of the core of everything that happens in the operating system, roughly 30 nanoseconds to retain and release an NS object on the current gen Intel. It's around six and a half nanoseconds on an M1 and an M1 running in in emulation or emulating it until it's about 14 nanoseconds, which it's just it's kind of it's nuts. I mean, flat out, it is just absolutely kind of spectacular what's going on. I'm I'm curious to hear what software compatibility is like. I know a lot of people who want to run things like Kali Linux or VMs. And it sounds like they've done a really good job on this migration. We'll see how people are talking about it in a couple of weeks. But yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's amazing. Looks like acquiring P.A. Semmy back in the day may have paid off. All right, Wired's Will Knight writes about a company called Canvas that has created a robot that can put up drywall. It is being used to help build the Harvey Milk Terminal in San Francisco, as well as an office building connected to Chase Center in San Francisco. The robot moves on four wheels. It uses lidar to scan unfinished walls and uses a robotic arm to smooth surfaces before applying a layer of drywall compound. The Canvas robot can do more drywall in less time than a human can, but it uses sensors to avoid running into people while it does it. It still needs a human to look at it and make sure that it's doing the right thing and it's getting what it needs to get done. That human doesn't have to know anything about drywall. It's just to oversee the robot, maybe reset it every once in a while. Robots in construction have been difficult in the past because of cost and complexity, but lower cost laser sensors, cheaper arms and grippers, open source software for computer vision are starting to make them more practical now. Canvas has the backing of the local international union of painters and allied trades who see it as a resource for skilled workers. They're not worried about this replacing jobs. Knight also mentioned in the wired story that autonomous volvos have been moving materials around on construction sites. Autonomous diggers and bulldozers from built robotics, robotic equipment for welding, drilling and bricklaying all are being used. And computer vision can be trained to monitor a site for delays and mistakes. That kind of monitoring can help in real time, but also improve future planning. They can just take that data and say, oh, this is where the, you know, the bottleneck happened. Let's design the construction differently next time to avoid that. So construction, if people don't realize, is actually one of the least disrupted by technology of any industry. You could say that it's had the fewest production gains over the past couple of decades. So it's kind of ripe for these sorts of improvements. Yeah, I mean, you know, just talking about, you know, AR a little bit earlier in the show and being able to scan a room and be like, okay, that's the distance from this side of the wall to this other side of the wall. And yeah, in construction sites, probably the reason a lot of this wasn't adopted earlier is, well, everything's built differently. You know, you don't just have these cookie cutter construction projects that are the same over and over. And so a robot has to understand that. And it's also pretty cool that the painters and allied trades union is like, no, this is great. You know, this will keep the people that understand these skills on a much higher level than the average person can apply those skills to things that, you know, really make the use of their knowledge rather than maybe putting up drywall all day. Not that that's not, you know, that is no small task, but have a little help. That's pretty cool. Patrick. I'm just, you know, obsessed now with getting my own autonomous bulldozer. It's like these, what? Built robotics. This is so much cooler than a scary cyborg space death dog. This is my personal autonomous bulldozer. I think it was real smart to get for a canvas to get the union on board for this. I don't know if that's, if that's common or not. It's the first time I've heard of it though. Well, Apple, speaking of Apple, we weren't really speaking of Apple, but AR anyway, Apple has a feature called App Tracking Transparency for iOS 14 that requires you to give explicit approval before an app can track you for targeted ads. Okay. After complaints from app makers led by Facebook back in September, Apple announced it would delay implementing this feature until early next year to give developers more time to prepare. On October 7th, eight civil and human rights groups wrote a letter criticizing Apple for the delay. Apple Senior Director of Global Privacy, Jane Horvath, wrote a letter in response to in which she wrote, quote, Facebook executives have made it clear that their intent is to collect as much data as possible and, quote, disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products. In response, Facebook said, quote, they're using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data. They claim it's about privacy, but it's about profit. A group of publishers, advertising groups and social media platforms filed an antitrust complaint in France against Apple late in October, arguing that Apple was using the language of consumer protection to cloak a deliberate attempt to stifle competition. Apple collects data on iOS users through a device ID called IDFA. Third parties like Facebook can use the IDFA to target ads. Right now, Apple lets any app maker access that IDFA, but the new feature would require each app to get consent, which in practice is expected to greatly reduce the data that third parties collect, thus producing ad revenue. So yeah, Apple uses IDFA. I believe Facebook may use IDGaF. I'm not sure something something like that. But this is interesting because Facebook has started to use. Let's just call antitrust. Anytime we don't like an opponent, let's call antitrust. Because while Apple has has some very questionable antitrust questionable practices, I don't believe this is one of them. I don't believe this is Apple. Now, Apple makes money off advertising, don't get me wrong. But I don't think this is Apple trying to benefit its own advertising practice. If there's evidence out there to the contrary, I'm willing to hear about it. But it feels like this is just Apple saying, we want to stop tracking if people don't want it. We want to make people have to opt into tracking no matter who's doing it. And now if we find that Apple is tracking, even if you even if you haven't consented, that's a whole different matter. But I don't think that's the situation here. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, listen, if it was a company other than Facebook, I might say, well, you know, all right, let's let's dig a little bit deeper into this. It's easy for me to kind of go like Facebook is complaining that Apple wants to take data and not give it to Facebook. I mean, Facebook, come on, look at yourself. But I don't know, Patrick, is this where do you stand on the side? I don't know. Probably right alongside you going with Facebook's doing and it's probably evil, even if it's accidentally evil, which is not fair. But I think Facebook's earned that reputation. I, you know, I think it's less about Facebook being evil and more about Facebook saying, well, hold on, we've enjoyed data collection in this way for a time, and now Apple's going to make it hard on us and we're mad. Yeah. I mean, and I get that. Apple's trying to argue like, hey, we didn't have this kind of data collection and there was an advertising industry for decades before this. We can go back to that and there'll be plenty of money. That's great if you're not Facebook, who's built their entire billion dollar enterprise on that extra data. I get why they're mad. I just don't think their argument that this is an antitrust violation and therefore Apple should stop, holds any water. Apple is empowering their users to turn off tracking that Apple users don't want. That will negatively impact us. Therefore, Apple is needs, yeah, I just, you know, I mean, this is like all of the privacy revelations at Facebook that in some cases or changes or making clear when you realize, when you finally read through them and you realize you were actually opening up more of your information to Facebook, if you did, it's disingenuous at best and pathetic at worst and it'll probably involve lots of lawyers and money and do nothing positive for preserving privacy on any platform. How's that for a cheery response? Yeah, I mean, this could, this could impact at Facebook's bottom line. I don't think it's got to put them out of business or anything, but it's certainly, you know, it's not going to help. Hey, folks, if you have some thoughts on this, hop in our Discord and talk with some other folks in the audience. There's always good conversations going on then there. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. The gift guides are out in force. CNET's got one. I mean, the Nantuck's guy, everybody's got one and Gadget has a section on small devices that recommends everything from a YubiKey to pop sockets. But what about that hardcore gear, GPUs, CPUs, AVRs, anything, any hope for a holiday miracle and this kind of stuff, Patrick? Oh, goodness, maybe, you know, if particularly like OLED TV, and other TVs for that matter, they're pretty much at their end of the year best prices you've ever seen them at cycle. There's a couple of amazing OLEDs from LG that are pretty much within $50 of the lowest price they've ever been. And in some case, you know, more than a third less than they were at launch. And that's part of what we expect, right? The new TVs are announced at CES. It takes a while. By summer, they're out. The prices drift down over time. But when they start to run out of the inventory, then TV prices go up. And what we're seeing in a lot of stuff, you know, I've seen stock run out on AVRs. If you're, let's put it this way, if you're trying to build a high end gaming rig, you're doomed right now. You can't buy GPUs. The 5,000 series AMD CPUs were available for like at launch day and haven't shown up again. 3,000 series GPUs are all over the map. AMD 6,000 series GPUs sold out within a heartbeat, it felt like I'm sure it wasn't quite that fast. Other stuff has been back and forth. A ton of televisions are available. Projectors are available. Set-top boxes are available. AVRs have been in and out. Some AVRs that I expected to be out of stock until a biscuit before Christmas are actually now in stock on Best Buy on Amazon. You know, other things not so available. A couple things I'd like to remind everybody going into Black Friday is, especially if you shop on an Amazon, camelcamelcamel.com is incredibly useful because sometimes prices go up before, right before Black Friday. So there's a discount from a price that was actually higher than the normal sales price or the normal, or in some cases the really crazy ones are some vendors will actually create an entirely new product skew on Amazon so that there is no older price data. So the earlier you check, the more likely you are to have accurate pricing information for something you're looking for. And if you are in that desperate hunt for a CPU, a GPU, or a console from Microsoft or Sony, now in stock.net is one way to try and track what's available and where it's available. If you're trying to get a console before Christmas, I have no idea what your likelihood is. But it feels like if you find one, you should buy it. I don't want to encourage anybody to go out there and pay the people on eBay that are charging two or three times what it should cost. But if Christmas is going to be ruined, if there's not a console, I think it's going to be a really tough holiday shopping season for you. Yeah. On the flip side, there's a lot of stuff that's available. It turns now in stock.net to nowinstock.net. Yeah, it's tough. And the PC stuff, we were talking about this earlier in the day, Tom. It's like NVIDIA always, they're like, GPUs. And then they always sell out. And there's always this kind of mad dash. But this is the first time I really remember NVIDIA being like, stock, we have a limited supply of GPUs. And me being like, wait a minute, are they getting honest or they basically have like eight? And once those eight are sold out, you're done. And in 2020, it could be a little bit of both, right? Yeah. It could be. I mean, if you're building sort of a mid-range gaming PC, inexpensive gaming PC, if you want to build a Plex server, there's a ton of hardware out there that's fantastic and is reasonably priced. It's just if you want a high-end gaming GPU or CPU, it's really, really tough. And if you want consoles, the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony, it's really, really tough. Other stuff, not so bad. But I would definitely, definitely, definitely shop early and ship early. Because the way things have been going this year, inventory has kind of been all over the map. And shipping has been kind of all over the map, depending on where you are. A question for you, Patrick. You mentioned AVRs. And I think a lot of people would be like, what's that? Oh, like a receiver. Sure. OK. It used to be kind of the only way that you could have a home theater setup. And so many folks have moved into soundbars and smart speakers that do a lot. Who is the AVR market at this point? Well, in 2020, it's gotten a lot bigger than it was at late 2019. That's one of the interesting side effects. I'll call it interesting. Of 2020 is that home theater sales have gone nuts, along with headphone sales and other things, because everybody's trapped inside the house and can't go to a movie theater. But a lot of people, if you want the best possible surround sound experience, then you should be looking at an AV receiver with discrete speakers or alternatively, Vizio and others make some really fantastic soundbars with wireless speakers for your left and right rear channels that sound really impressive. If you've just dropped $2,000 and OLED TV, do yourself a favor. Spend some money, at the very least, on a very, very good soundbar with a discrete subwoofer and rear channels. Or if you can afford it, a full set of speakers. And because one of the things I noticed after spending a lot of time stuffed in an RV with the family, it was really crazy rewatching. Because basically, we had a 42-inch Roku TCL TV, which the speakers are not bad. We played around with some external speakers, and they were better. But when I got the surround sound system set up in the new house, it was amazing how much detail was in the soundtrack, for example, in the Mandalorian, that we had just lost or that was not nearly as present. Especially for me, it's been fun, because I'm in a space where I can finally do four Atmos overhead channels. And I could really care less about a lot of the, oh, it's five dot ones really, really good. Seven dot one, well, it's a little better. Nine dot one, well, that's certainly more speakers. For me, Atmos was one of those things where it was kind of mind-blowing how much better it is. And part of that is how the soundtrack is put together in Atmos. And part of that is, a huge part of that is how the sounds are played back through the speakers and the level of control it gives to the sound designer when they're putting together the soundtrack. So, you know, soundbar better than TV speakers, computer speakers, if you have a pair sitting in the closet are probably better than your TV speakers. But, you know, a soundbar and then a soundbar with subwoofers and discreet surround speakers or wireless surround speakers. And then, you know, if you really want to go for it, having a full set of surround sound speakers on an A.V. receiver is kind of amazing these days. So, does that help? Yeah, no, it helps a lot. I'm just, as you were explaining that I'm like, why do I put the rear speakers in my house? Why do I put them? Everyone but a high-end gamer is gonna have a happy holidays with what I do. Exactly, right. We can try. Well, speaking of happy holidays, I don't know, how about some science? Wired's Daniel Oberhaus wrote up a story about scientists at the Johns Hopkins University, applied physics laboratory, that demonstrated solar thermal propulsion, which works by solar heating liquid helium, which expands and then is released through a small nozzle to create thrust. So, a rocket powered by the sun could be used for interstellar probes. It could be the fastest, most efficient way to send a craft out of our solar system. Three times more efficient than the best chemical engines. You just need it to keep from exploding. Just a tiny detail. The engine would be used with a gravity assist from the sun to reach its top speed, something called the Oberth maneuver that would involve spending two and a half hours at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Kind of toasty. So it needs special materials that won't melt, won't otherwise degrade, you know, they gotta stay intact. If they determine what those materials are, the next test would use them to show thrust in conditions similar to an actual mission. At the end of 2021, the team will submit its research to the U.S. National Academics Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine's Heliophysics decadal survey which determines sun-related science priorities for the next 10 years. Yeah, that's kind of the race they're having is if they could figure out all the materials that wouldn't degrade into that heat, they could do a test with those materials and then they could nail the submission. As it is, they have a lot of data and they think they might have a chance of getting some prioritized funding. But if we wanna send interstellar probes, I mean, it's nice that Voyager 1 and 2 are out there now. Took them a long time. They weren't designed to be interstellar probes. These things could essentially whiz by Voyager 1 and 2 and start telling us what's really out there, which is really exciting. All right folks, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Jeff in Knoxville, Tennessee who wrote in with his thoughts of our Amazon story yesterday about Echo Frames and the idea of AR glasses. Are we ready for them? Jeff is an owner, has the original version and says, most non-smart frames cost around the same as Echo Frames so that the audio is directional, not bone conducting, so the quality is so-so. Jeff also said, it turns out that Amazon's assistant is a great home assistant but not a very good personal assistant. As an example, I once asked her, when is my dinner reservation tonight? She replied, I don't know how to help you. Then I used the long press feature to launch Google Assistant, asked the same question, received a response that included the time and location of my reservation and even when I should leave to beat the traffic. In this case, Google certainly gave me what I wanted, Amazon did not, despite having access to the same calendar. I'd also say that for a device, as personal as glasses, Alexis should do voice matching to prevent stray wakeups but she doesn't and as a result, my son loves to abomb me by whispering in my ear. Jeff did say he will probably pay the $70 to upgrade to the new glasses. So he's committed, he's committed. There's some drawbacks, sounds like. If he didn't get the upgrade, the trade-in program, it sounded like he was a little more hesitant in his email but since it's only 70 bucks, yeah, why not? I don't know, Patrick, you ready for some Echo Frames? Not even the least, no. No. We were talking on the show yesterday, it's like I am now a person who has to wear reading glasses more often than not. If they could be smart in some way, I'm not against this idea, but yeah, as Jeff mentioned, there are obviously some limitations depending on the assistant that you're using, calendar, coordination and the like. I feel very comfortable with being a very late adopter on this particular corner of technology and I like you, I wear reading glasses more and more often and I just trying to focus with reading glasses is hard enough without accidentally waking up certain people or I get the theory because who doesn't wanna control their thermostat by talking to their eyeglasses? Which if I'd said that 10 years ago, you'd all be staring and looking at me like I'd finally completely gone around the bend but when the speakers sound good, then maybe I'll start thinking about it. Well, if you have questions, comments, got a story like Jeff's, send them to us. We'd love to get your feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels today. They include Brandon Brooks, Tim deputy and Paul Reese. Now you may have noticed Len Peralta is not with us today. He had a round table that conflicted with being on the show, but he still drew for the show. Thank you, Len. He drew a little tribute to Microsoft Windows 35th birthday and the Windows is wishing the Wii a happy 14th birthday. So maybe if Windows does run for president, the Wii could be its running mate. The Wii's like you're so old, you're 35. I think the Wii has to be 35 too for that to work, but yeah, the Wii's like dude, you're old man. Well, thanks Len Peralta. We miss you, but thanks for joining for us as usual. Also thanks to Patrick Norton. Oh, LenPeraltaStore.com, we shouldn't forget. If you want to get that poster, go check it out. You can see it and buy it, LenPeraltaStore.com. Thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us today, Patrick. You were rocketing down the highway in our pre-show meeting. Where can't you be? Apparently in space, but I'm looking forward to it in the future. Or on, well, I won't say her name. Certain brands of glasses that are voice activated. AVXL.com, or I'm starting to participate in Twitter again, that's twitter.com slash Patrick Norton. Just tweet at Patrick Norton if you have a question about tech or audio or video gear. Excellent. Hey folks, if you need a little more explanation on big tech topics like Wi-Fi 6, 5G, just did an episode about the EU-US Privacy Shield. Check out our related show, Know a Little More, to know a little more about all that and more. Know a little more.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. If you can join us live, love to have you. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Hey, we're gonna be back on Monday with Robert Herron. Talk to you then. Yeah, it's AVXL Bookends. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.