 Coming up on DTNS, everything you need to know about the end of the epic Apple trial program with natural language at Microsoft Build and Huawei's plans for soft power. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about LGTM. Apparently it does not mean let's go Tom Merritt. If you'd like to know what it means, well, you could search Urban Dictionary or listen to Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Steel series announced new gaming accessories that the company says are designed to win championships. On the wired side is the Arctis Prime headset for $100, which has a mute button and a volume wheel along with a mic proprietary USB cable and 3.5 millimeter ports. The $130 Prime wireless mouse has a high arch designed for right-handed gamers. A lot of mice are more of an ambidextrous style. USB-C charging port, battery life up to 100 hours and magnetic optical switches rated for up to 100 million clicks. On the wired mouse side, Steel series announced the $80 Prime plus and $60 Prime mice. A group of Bitcoin miners, mostly in North America, have formed a Bitcoin mining council to promote energy usage transparency. Elon Musk said the group will publish current and planned renewable usage. More data on how Bitcoin mining is powered would help research into its effects. Though 75% of mining is thought to come from China and no Chinese miners appear to be involved in the group. TikTok changed the text to speech voice after a lawsuit filed by voice actor Bev Standing claims she never agreed to work with ByteDance in that capacity, only that her recordings were meant to be used for translations. A new text to speech voice is already running on TikTok, while video is created before the change continue to use the old voice. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill regulating how social media companies moderate speech online. That's not that's not the new TikTok voice. I wish I was. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did sign a bill regulating how social media companies moderate speech online. Platforms are required to detail how they reach moderation decisions and users are enabled to sue the platform if they feel a decision was made unfairly. And we're starting a betting pool for how long it will take for this to be struck down in the courts. Owners of our first gen Nest Hub may or may not notice a change today as Google rolls out Fuchsia OS for the first time, replacing the Linux based Cast OS under the hood. There'll be no changes to the UI or app functionality at least at this point. And the rollout will proceed over the next several months, starting with those enrolled in the preview program. Yeah, when they first announced fuchsia, I remember he's like, what another operating system? It's going to be so confusing. And it turns out the first use of it is something almost unnoticeable, because they were using another OS for these things on the desktop that nobody even realized. So hey, it's out there though, real fuchsia. Let's talk a little more about the epic Apple trial. It closed Monday. And now Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will take what is likely months to review the 4500 pages of testimony and make her bench decision what she decides will likely be appealed. But it's still important because it's going to set the tone and possibly narrow the room to maneuver in future cases. Any trust rulings from federal district courts are also rare. So no matter what this one will carry a lot of weight just in how people think about this stuff. Alright, what will make the decision? The key to this is what the market is. Once the judge determines that, she can decide if there was a base of that mar or if there was a monopoly use of that market. And if so, what the remedy should be. Apple argued the market is gaming as a whole. In which case, it's not a monopoly, right? If you buy Apple's argument, it's like, yeah, you know, there's a lot of gaming operating systems, lots of game stores out there. Epic argued that iOS itself is a market because of size and lock in. And there's precedent for that. It's not ridiculous argument to make. And therefore, if it is a market, Apple excluding other app stores could be seen as abusing its monopoly position. The judge might also pick something in between. The judge might say, I think mobile gaming is the market, which would have some leeway. If Apple convinced the judge that gaming is the market, there's no monopoly, no need for a remedy. That'll be simple. However, if the judge is convinced of any monopolization by Apple at all, here are the possible remedies the judge could choose. The most drastic would be to force Apple to open up to other app stores. The medium remedy would be to force Apple to allow apps to offer their own payment systems instead of just offering apples like you can now. And the most limited remedy would be to force Apple to let developers mention that other payment systems are available elsewhere on the web. Right now, Apple doesn't even allow you to say that in your app. It's not obvious how the judge is going to rule. She said Apple's profits from game makers look disproportionate, but she also pointed out that if Epic wins, it's going to go from a multi-billion dollar company to a multi-trillion dollar company. Those are her words. She also pointed out that courts don't run businesses. So she didn't seem to be picking a side. However, in one area, she did seem a little more interested. And that was in Apple's reasoning for not letting developers mention alternative ways of paying. She said, quote, Apple's hiding of that information in a way that is not directly reflected to the consumer seems to be anti-competitive. And after all the appeals are done, no matter how she rules, somebody's going to win. What are the consequences going to be? Well, if Apple wins this in the end, regulators will see this as a setback and it probably will make them want to push for new legislation. If Epic wins, it's a release valve on some of the antitrust pressure on tech companies. It might also encourage more lawsuits, both against Apple and others. And don't forget, there's an Epic Google lawsuit sitting out there waiting for the resolution of this one. Because if Apple is only forced to add in app payments, well, Google could easily do that and settle out of court. If Apple wins entirely, though, Epic's likely to take Google to court while they appeal Apple or they might wait for the whole Apple thing to finish, which will take years. Sarah, if you had to guess, I mean, neither one of us have any specific insight in how this judge is going to rule. I don't even know if the judge knows how she's going to rule, but what do you think? She's got 4,500 pages of testimony. It's going to take a minute. If I had to guess, I mean, I think Apple arguing that gaming is the market way too broad. That's, I don't know. I mean, sure, maybe Apple will get a win there, but I really doubt it. iOS itself as a market is actually a pretty good argument on Epic's case, I think. But if I had to put money on it, I would say that Apple will be forced to let developers tell people that there is another place that they can, you know, buy something that is being offered by the developer that is in the iOS store, and that's how they found it. That seems like a fair, well, not a fair trade, because Epic is obviously arguing for, you know, for a lot more, but that seems like just the baseline of, yeah, why can't you, you know, that is kind of anticompetitive. That would be my guess here. I don't think Apple's going to be forced to do much more than this. It's just, you know, it's Apple, and, you know, they got a strong legal team, but that would be, that is my prediction. Yeah, I think I'm with you on that. Epic, it did not appear that the judge was swayed that Epic is being, you know, unduly harmed. She's like, y'all are making plenty of money over there. And the judge isn't trying to make anybody happy. The judge is trying to interpret the law and say, OK, how does the law apply here? It's always misinterpreted in court cases. The judge isn't rooting for anybody. She's just like, OK, what does the law say and how does what you say apply? And you're all trying to trick me into applying the law, but I'm going to try to look through what you said and find the facts. I think she did a really good job of that. She definitely thinks, I think you're right, that not letting developers say there's an outside payment is wrong. Yeah, I guess the only question will be, can she find a legal justification for forcing Apple to do that? I would absolutely expect her in her decision to take Apple to task for that. But I could see her saying, however, there's nothing in the law that says you have to, so I'm not going to make you do it. However, if she can find a legal justification for it, I bet bet she will. I bet she will order Apple to do that. But yeah, it doesn't seem like Epic is a clear winner at this point. We'll see. Yeah, yes, we will. And as you mentioned, probably going to take a while. Arm introduced its first designs to the new arm V nine architecture, including the flagship Cortex a seven 10 CPUs and Molly G seven 10 GPU. These are the designs that will be used in chips appearing in Android phones starting in early 2022. On the CPU side, there are three core designs chip makers mix and match these designs into clusters and then make CPUs out of them. The Cortex X two core promises 16% performance improvement over the X one. This design lets partners include specialized cores for specific use cases. The a seven 10 is the workhorse big core promising 10% performance gains and 30% better energy efficiency over the a 78 and arm updated the little core and that's for the first time since 2017. The A 5 10 is 35% better performing and 20% more energy efficient than the A 55. And it's the same idea with the Molly GPUs with a top level Molly G seven 10 for gaming, the Molly G five 10 for mid range devices and the budget Molly G three 10, which is useful in smaller devices like watches. Yeah, this is a this is a big update for arm because they're replacing the entire design line and they showed like they didn't name Qualcomm, but they basically showed here's the cluster that's used in the 888 and they showed some nice big improvement performance numbers. If you did the equivalent, which would be one X two core three of the a seven 10s and then four of the a five 10s because you get the efficiency of the little cores. You get the power improvement of the big cores and then you get that specialized core usually for something like machine learning or something like that. It's it's not on the face of it. Something's going to blow you away, but I think you're going to see more powerful devices, better battery life and likely more devices. In fact, one of the one of the things you mentioned, Sarah, is watches being able to use the Mali G 3 10, but they'll also be able to use that improved little core, the a 7 10 as well. So so you'll see more powerful devices in more places as long as as well as a little better battery life, mostly for Android devices, but some other iot devices to Roger. I know you follow this really closely. What do you think? I think what they're doing, I mean what's what's interesting is this is a one of the larger, not product, but generational announcements that they've done. Everything up until now has been mostly just mild iteration updates to to their lineup. This is a this is a big shift. I mean, especially with the Cortex X 2, it's one of it's the first time they're deprecating 32 bit instructions, 32 bit instructions won't run on it. And this is a noticeable shift in their line of thinking, but also Android from Google as well with Android where they're shifting to 64 bit code execution. They're leaving the leaving 32 bit into the A710 because there's still a lot of Chinese developers that still don't have the same kind of cohesive ecosystem that Google or even Apple has when it comes to the play or the Apple Store. But with the especially with the Cortex X 2 scalability is one of the features that the announced and you could potentially see this in a laptop class device, you know, very soon, if not, you know, within within maybe a year's time. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And probably some data center servers as well. We'll take advantage of this. This is not what Apple uses. Apple uses the ARM instruction set, but it designs from the ground up. So it's not really going to affect Apple if you're wondering about that. But Qualcomm, you know, all the other ARM based chip designers that go into other devices are going to use this. Well, speaking of Chinese developer, what do you do if you're a hardware company, but one of the most powerful governments and biggest markets in the world has decided to pick a fight with you and stop you from being able to get parts to build your products. You stockpile for a while. But eventually, the stockpile runs out or the parts that you stockpile just start to become slowly obsolete. So your move apparently is to become a software company. At least that's the implication of an internal memo sent from Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei to staff. Reuters obtained a copy of the memo where the CEO tells staff to focus on Huawei's cloud AI platform, Minespore and Harmony OS software doesn't require parts. So it's harder for the U.S. or anyone else to control. Ren wrote, quote, once we dominate Europe, the Asia Pacific and Africa, if U.S. standards don't match ours and we can't enter the U.S. then the U.S. can't enter our territory. Huawei teased on WeChat a Harmony OS related announcement coming June 2nd. That might be phones it's more than likely to be something like TVs or watches or IOT from what we know about Harmony OS, but we'll find out June 2nd. It'll be interesting to see what they announced. Some some big words from Ren there, Sarah, of plans to dominate Europe. And listen, I don't pretend to know how many people work at Huawei and what their areas of expertise all are. But for the person at the top to say, you know, we all need to do focus more on software. I mean, not everybody working at Huawei is going to be like, great, let me flip the switch and we'll just do that. You know, it's it's that that's probably there's that's a very complicated ask. There are also, you know, there's there's probably plans in place and have been for some time of this as some sort of an option should things. Drag out as they have between Huawei and the U.S. But yeah, I mean, I guess if you if you're you're still a company, you're trying to sell stuff to people and you have some sort of a software component and people who can continue to develop those products. I suppose that's what you do and get really good at it and get the U.S. to go, huh? Well, crap. Now we're kind of, you know, left out of the party. Yeah, I mean, I'm with Ren Zhengfei up to a point, which is you spun off honor so that honor can keep making great midrange phones and probably expand it to high end stuff. You're you're going to you've been working on Harmony OS. You've been plowing resources into it. So pivoting to be a software company makes sense because it's something that you can do and be successful. I don't know if you dominate. I mean, I guess that's the thing you say to fire up the troops, right? We're going to first we take Europe and then Asia Pacific and then Africa or maybe not in that order. But I I'm a little less convinced that Huawei's software will, you know, no doubt sweep sweep across the globe and make the U.S. decide to change its mind about Huawei. We've seen across two administrations that the U.S. definitely doesn't want to give Huawei a break. They'll ease up on TikTok with a change of administration and other companies like Xiaomi. But there's I've never quite understood exactly what it is. I don't buy the cover story exactly, but there is something about Huawei that really ticks off the United States government. And if that's not going to change, then yeah, the software it is, I suppose. Hey, folks, if you want to eat TNS as a video podcast, get the video RSS feed at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash subscribe. Go check it out right now. Microsoft build started on Tuesday, which is always a very developer focused conference. But like Google I. Oh, and Apple's WWDC. There are always a few announcements that are of interest to consumers and also the enterprise. Yeah, let's let's run through and Microsoft is using open AI's GPT three natural language model to translate spoken text into code in its power effects language as part of its no code low code power apps service. That's that's where you make it so you don't have to know the entire language to make some stuff. Now, this has limits. You can't just say make me a YouTube app, but you can say things like find orders where the name starts with cheese and power apps will then create the filter string formula that searches orders for names that start with cheese. So that's an element in your program that you can add. You still have to understand the logic of the app, but you just don't have to hammer out every formula. Takes some of the TD amount makes it a little more accessible and typo proof. Think of it as a more robust version of natural language queries like you have in spreadsheets already feature is going live to English users in North America by the end of June. Very cool. I would like to be able to say make me a YouTube app. Yeah, right? Make me the next tiktok. Go. Yeah, just make it. Yeah, I don't know the language. Come on. Texas. Yeah, but this is helpful if you're like, well, I know I need it. I know I need this app, especially in a corporate environment. I like I needed to search the product orders, find the ones about cheese and then tag them and export a list and email it to this person. Like you can just say that stuff and it'll be like, OK, so you need this line, this line, this line, this line. Yeah, yeah, it is a spreadsheet like in a way. Yeah. If if this then. Also, Microsoft recently announced plans to shut down the Azure blockchain as a service offering. And now we know what it plans to replace it with. Whereas Microsoft would put it shifting from a product oriented offering to a partner oriented solution. Oh, yeah, right. The Azure confidential ledger also known as ACL is a blockchain with an added layer of security. ACL runs on Microsoft's confidential consortium framework, also known as Coco Coco works for any ledger. So this is Microsoft's implementation of that. If you don't want to build your own, a lot of people are not going to want to. The company says it'll be useful for industries that need audit logging or tracking sensitive sensitive admin ops like in finance or healthcare supply chain or really any industry that exchanges contracts securely. Yeah, I guess it's the old buyer build conundrum and Microsoft is saying here, well, let's let's give you a buy option for taking advantage of blockchain for secure tracking. But also in this world of supply chain attacks, being able to offer something like this with security built in, I think it'll be a valuable service for a lot of companies who either don't have the expertise in house or don't want to spend the time and money building it from the ground up. Some some will still want to use Coco on their own. But yeah, this this makes sense to me that hey, blockchain isn't just this free. It's like everything else in the Internet. It's not just this free open thing that can never be attacked. Let's let's provide a more bulletproof version of that. I wonder if someone breaks the Azure confidential ledger. Would you say they tore the ACL? Oh, Tom, you never seize to amaze me. Yes, I hope that's what they that I hope that's the term. It's all medical jokes. This also does give a lot more contacts to Amazon saying that it planned to shut down the Azure blockchain as a service. We talked about this on a on a show somewhat recently, and it was a little bit out of the blue like, okay, I mean, seems like something that Microsoft would put more R&D into rather than shutting it off entirely. And clearly there was more going on. Yeah, they were just shifting from a product. What did you say a product oriented offering to a partner solution oriented solution? Yes, well, there we should have solving things with partners. As part of its goal to be a carbon negative organization by the end of the decade, Microsoft is partnering with Accenture GitHub, its own GitHub ThoughtWorks and Linux Foundation on the green software foundation, the GSF software doesn't really affect emissions on its own, but the hardware it runs on does data centers use about 2000 terawatt hours or about six or seven Denmark's of energy if that's how you like to think about these things. The new foundation intends to focus on sustainable software industry standards, research and development and advocacy. I got nothing bad to say about this one. You know, the the more that emissions can be minimized, pretty good stuff. By the way, 2000 it's 200 200 terawatt hours but six or seven Denmark's is still accurate. Yeah, if I I'm a little unclear what they intend to achieve, maybe it's just early enough in the process that they don't have a good list of that. But with the Linux Foundation involved, I imagine there are some tangible achievements they think they can reach. Yeah, not a lot of Windows News at build, although CEO Satya Nadella did say that there will be a Windows focused event coming soon. But if you're a Linux and Windows user, and I know a lot of you are, there are a few good tidbits. The next release of Windows 10 will include support for Linux GUI apps on the Windows subsystem for Linux or WSL. So no need for a virtual machine. WSL is also adding support for apps that use the GPU great for machine learning tools. Quake mode will let you open a terminal window from anywhere in Windows with a keyboard shortcut. That's nice and convenient. And Microsoft released version of point eight of the project reunion SDK, which you might also think of as the project. Man, do we regret splitting win 32 and universal apps? Remember Windows eight everybody? 1.0 project reunion is expected this fall. Yeah, Satya Nadella was saying a lot of things about like the next version of Windows is gonna is gonna be the biggest change for developers. And we're doing a he all but said we're doing a separate Windows event next month. But he did allude that they're gonna do a separate Windows event. It does seem to be about the store, right? They're gonna be they're gonna make the store easy to access sell whatever you want win 32. It doesn't have to be universal anymore. The probably let everybody use their own payment systems just because that's in the news with Apple and Epic. That that's my guess. Be on the lookout for that. Maybe maybe soon, maybe in June. Microsoft Teams has 145 million daily active users now. So it's big fluid components in teams chat can let users send messages with like a table action item or lists. Those can even be collaboratively edited in chat. Fluid components can be copied and pasted now as well. Devs also get real time access to audio and video streams if they want to do programs that do transcription or translation, other things like that. There will also be some low code integrations with Azure and admins will be able to buy third party app license subscriptions in the teams app store. Microsoft Outlook on the web is getting message extensions like tasks and Microsoft Graph can now index third party data and have it appear in your company's internal search. Companies can also use graph to add more information from more sources to employee profiles. So it makes it easier for you to find the right person and know more about them in your your company intranet. I'd love to know more from anybody out there who's like, oh, I use teams every day constantly. And, you know, some of the announcements is going to greatly improve productivity with my team members because I don't use teams. It's just it's just not I have other solutions for, you know, for my workflow. But I know clearly 145 million daily active users. It's a lot of people. Yeah, one or two. Yeah, they're listening. Yeah, exactly. You're probably writing in teams right now. Hey, they're talking about teams on DTNS. So write us back at daily techfuture.com. Tell us all about it. You also likely know what TikTok is. I don't know. I'm it's a bit of a stretch, right? Serious XM is partnering with TikTok few different ways. There'll be a new TikTok channel on Serious XM hosted TikTok playlist on Pandora, which Serious owns, and re-aerians of Pandora live events on TikTok. Oh, it's in partnership. Indeed. Starting today, TikTok creator Bella Porch will curate, host and promote her own Pandora playlists on TikTok. If you're not familiar, she's an extremely popular TikToker. More other more popular TikTok creators besides her will also be offering their playlist added in the coming months. Pandora will also offer an overall TikTok hits playlist. Pandora is not the first company to do that. Spotify and Apple Music also curate TikTok type content and editorial playlists as well. And a lot of that has to do with music either either resurging in popularity or becoming popular for the first time through TikTok itself. It's a whole phenom. Yeah, TikTok's the new hitmaker, right? Whether I've been Lil Nas X made his career getting popular on TikTok. He doesn't he still does a lot of TikTok. He doesn't rely on it as much as he did in his early career. But I don't think I don't think he is as big as he is without it. And he's not alone. It's the new top 40 radio. You get pop, except you don't. You can't pay a DJ to play your 45 anymore. You got to get an influencer to pick up your your song and put it in their TikTok videos. Yeah, all right, let's check out the mailbag. So Doug wrote in about our conversation yesterday about the electric F 150 the F 150 lightning. It was specifically the lightning pro. Now Doug worked on the electrical architecture for Ford. So he's has some he has some knowledge. He says richest point about towing lowering the range is correct. But that would be very situational and depend on everything from the wind resistance of your trailer to how hilly your local terrain is to how heavy your trailer is. For some users, the electric vehicle won't be appropriate. But I suspect many common scenarios will work out just fine. As hinted at during the show, Ford is obsessive about understanding its truck customers. So I would not bet that they haven't covered all of the important common use cases, not just for the pros, but for personal use vehicles as well. The other big consideration about the electric F 150 for professionals that didn't get mentioned is that it has a large amount of built in generating capability for the work site. If you're a contractor, for instance, rather than using a big chunk of your truck bed carrying a generator to your project, you can just carry your power tools and the vehicle itself will provide the energy you need for a day's work. Almost certainly more power than most portable generators can make and one less thing to worry about buying or getting lost. I can personally attest to that last part because when they were redoing my roof on my house, they kept asking me, can we plug our power tool equipment into your outlet? So they had to run these long extension cords, had a long one from my garage and then I actually have one outside and they were constantly had their their nail guns and their power saws all plugged in constantly because when you're in a job site, you got to cut things to fit whatever project you're working on. Yeah, man, F 150s to they capture the imagination. I always think of my wife's Tita who when she first moved to the US saw all the Ford trucks and kept asking about the Fiso trucks and I cannot not see that now she thought that five was an S and the one was an I it's like she she was doing lead speak before school. Oh, that's great. Well, if you have thoughts on electric trucks or anything really feedback at daily tech news show dot com is where to send those emails. Thank you in advance. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. We shout you out every day and we choose three of you and today they are Ali Sunjabi, Dale McKay he and Scott Hepburn. We also want to do an extra special thanks to Dustin Campbell. Dustin is one of our top lifetime supporters for DNS. You've been with us for eons now, Dustin. Thank you for all the years of support. We are live Monday to Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. If you can join us live, we would love to have you and we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.