 Coming up on DTNS, Google Messages gets loaded with features plus Magic Leap 2 is a real product now and Substack starts slowly bringing up the drawbridge just a little bit. Play ball, DTNS! This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 10th, Mario Day 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merrick. And from Studio Roadward, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. There is a longer version of this show. If you like what we do here, you can get more of it. It's called Good Day Internet and it's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons. We're going to include three of them today, Tim Deputy, Brennan Brooks and Hector Bones. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nvidia announced it'll offer a single month, $20 membership for its RTX 3080 tier of GeForce Now's Gamed streaming service. You might recall this is an addition to the six month subscription plan for $100 that Nvidia launched back in November along with its RTX 3080 GeForce Now update. GeForce Now offers a priority membership as well for $10 a month or $50 for six months. That lets folks stream up to 1080p at 60 frames per second and six hour game chunks. There's also a free tier that tops out in one hour chunks. Yeah, those chunks don't blow. Sony and Nintendo announced they were suspending all shipments to Russia for the foreseeable future. The PlayStation Store will also no longer be available in Russia. Nintendo shut down its eShop in the country last week. Amazon Pharmacy will offer a new prescription, a drug discount to Blue Cross Shield, Blue Cross and Blue Shield customers in five states, New Jersey, Nebraska, Alabama, Florida and Kansas. Medications purchased with a discount card will still count toward an insurance deductible. Tinder users will now be able to run background checks in the app through Tinder Safety Center. These will be powered by the non-profit Garbo with two free background checks for each user for the first 500,000 searches. Garbo will then charge $2.50 per thereafter. Garbo also launched a standalone background check service in the US with the same pricing. Online dating has never been so fun. Nine to five Mac sources say that Apple is developing two Mac Minis, one with a new M2 system on a chip and another with an M2 Pro. Both chips are based on Apple's A15 chip with the M2 using the same CPU cores as the M1 but offering a 10-core GPU. The M2 Pro reportedly offers 12 CPU cores, eight goes to performance, four to efficiency, although no word on GPU specs as of yet. All right, let's talk a little more about these new Google features. Google announced a bunch of them. We'll start with Google Messages. The feature that will interpret reactions from iOS tap-backs sent over SMS to Android users is now available to everybody using Android in English. More languages are to follow and Google took the opportunity to say it will still welcome Apple's decision someday to join it in supporting RCS, the standard supported by phone companies for rich communication that succeeds SMS. So they just had to get another jab in there about Apple not supporting RCS. Messages also gets a Google Photos sharing link feature so that if you're sending a photo or video to a non-RCS compliant recipient like an Apple Messages user, you can send that link instead. That works right now for videos and will come for photos soon. Also, links to YouTube videos will show a preview for iOS users of Google Messages now. Messages can also remind you to respond if a Messages has sat for a while. That's a setting you can choose to do. You don't have to do that. And also you can have it remind you if one of your contacts is having a birthday based on the information you put in the Contacts list. A couple features available in India are now available to everybody as well worldwide. You can use an option to automatically delete one-time passcodes that have been sent to you after they've sat there for 24 hours. Some people don't like it. Clutters up their messages and you can filter text messages into personal and business. Kind of like what you can do with Gmail. Outside of Messages, we've got a bunch of other features as well. You'll be able to use Google Assistant to use your Google Pay to pay for parking if the parking is part of the Park Mobile app. You'll just say, hey, Google, pay for parking. And then they'll walk you through it. Gboard, the keyboard, gets on-device grammar correction and an emoji kitchen. You can use to mash up emojis into stickers in case you want to replace heart eyes with poop emojis or something. Live Transcribe is an Android feature that will do real-time speech to text captions for users who are deaf or hard of hearing. It uses the internet for that, but has an offline mode, so it'll still work if you're like down in a subway or something away from a connection. Google One members and Pixel users will get portrait blur for more than just humans. You can get portrait blur for your pets, your food, and your plants. It works on old pictures too, even if you didn't take them with portrait mode. Google TV is getting a highlights tab that'll have some personalized entertainment news. A screen time widget is going to give you daily timers for apps and quick options to turn on focus mode or bedtime mode. And Nearby Share, which is kind of the Android version of Airplay, can now share with more than one person at a time as long as you're on Android 6 and up. Man, these are times that I wish I had an Android smartphone just to be able to kind of compare to how I use my smartphone every day, or anything that's running Android, because I don't use it. I use iOS and iOS in a variety of ways, also Mac OS, a little bit of Windows, but no Android. However, this seems like a pretty great feature list. Certainly a lot of updates that I know people have been wanting for some time. Let's get real though. The big divide here is the blue-bubble-green-bubble issue that is a group chat, a culture war, to put not too far to point on it. This gets closer to the idea of Google magnanimously, of course, from their perspective, going out of their way to make up for the fact that iOS is on something that is not compliant, but could bring everybody altogether. But it does show that, look, this is a pain point. As weird as it is to say out loud, like there is this element of blue-bubble-green-bubble that is a part of our tech fabric. I know people say that, but I've got plenty of green-bubble friends, and yeah, I can't think of any particularly lively group texts that I'm on. Some of your best friends are green-bubbles, I get it. Why wouldn't they be? I know that there are a few compatibility issues, but I don't feel like any of my Android folk are up in arms about this all that much. If anything, they're indifferent. Android folks, it's not the Android folks, it's the iOS folks. Are they though? I'm not. If you have ever had a blue-bubble-only chat, the next thing you know, one of your, one of the crew needs to fold their phones, so they got to go Android. Now, next thing you know, the whole group chat's all messed up, changed the title. There's just, there's things. It's a thing. It's a thing. You know, like any group of friends, you know, you got a wild card sometimes. You do. And look, I would love to bring this together. This would be a moment that I do believe would have genuine cultural worth if Apple and Google were to come together and to unite an interoperable chat system, and I hope it happens. Listen, Apple, if Major League Baseball can come to an agreement with the players, you can support RCS for goodness sake. Do it. Yeah. Get Scott Boris involved. Well, if you've been following the Magic Leap saga over the last some odd years, you might be forgiven for saying, what in the heck is going on with that company? The Magic Leap 2 is set for launch later this year, but the company's story over the last few years has been less about tech advancement and more about what's going on. Why do they lay all these people off? You know, got a new CEO. What is the direction of the company? Peggy Johnson has been CEO since 2020, former biz, a dev exec at Microsoft and also Qualcomm. They shifted from a mass market plan, they being Magic Leap, to enterprise and training, also targeting healthcare, manufacturing and defense. The Magic Leap 2 was officially announced in 2019. So we've heard about it for some time, but haven't seen much, is finally offering some publications, a limited demo of a version that has complete hardware and at least in development software. So the Magic Leap 2 is smaller than the 2018 Magic Leap 1 with a pair of goggles wired to a small box, a small computer, but a box that you could, you know, maybe have on a, you know, on a waist strap or something with an AMD chip, no longer Nvidia that you can hang from, you know, a shoulder as well. You know, you can get creative, but it's got to be tethered to you in some form. The goggles have small LCOS displays to refract light to project holographic images into a 70 degree diagonal field of view. Now that's still under the headset standard of around 110 degrees, but it's better than it was, weighs 248 grams, that is down from the original Magic Leap 316 grams. And the company has also switched optical tracking using headset based sensors and cameras mounted into the actual controller. Johnson says having to tether to a computer hasn't been a major issue for at least their current customers that are using it for training simulations and also medical diagnoses. One new feature makes images stand out against the real world in a way that has been getting quite a bit of attention by dimming parts or all of the view range from slight dimming to blackout. So you're just kind of seeing what you're supposed to see even though it's AR. That helps putting virtual objects in front of real ones and is also meant to help focus and eliminate distractions as well as see projections if you're in bright out light, for example. Uses Android open source, Unity compatibility as well and developers can share 3D models with a connection to a phone. So you've got some options there. So if you're asking yourself, is Magic Leap just now for enterprise? That kind of seems like what they're going for. Johnson told CNET, quote, I do believe at some point down the road will circle back to consumer, but it's going to be when the devices are more fully integrated and lightweight, and we can make the field of view even bigger, which is I can imagine the biggest pain points of trying to make something like this a consumer product. Magic Leap 2 is expected to be available by the end of the year. We don't have a specific date, but that's what they've told us at a price definitely higher than the Magic Leap 1. Don't know exactly how much, but the Magic Leap 1 started at $2,295. Yeah, at least that's what they told CNET. So we'll find out what happens there. And also that 70 degree field of view is pretty good for an AR headset. If you compare it to HoloLens, it's just still well below what you would get with like an Oculus or some other VR headset. I look at this and I think, thank goodness, Magic Leap is a real product that I don't feel impelled to mock anymore. It's something that people can buy. It's useful. I think Johnson has done an amazing job of turning it into a solid business, and maybe it'll grow into a consumer business someday. Maybe it'll just stay enterprise focused. But this dimming thing is the thing that caught my eye because I've often thought that the eventual device will not be VR or AR, but an AR headset that could blacken out and become VR, and this is a step towards that road. It's not quite full blackout yet, but it's down the road where it's like, yeah, your headset can be either one. Just depends on what you want. Well, it's like, yeah, some sort of like window focus mode type thing that I think a lot of people, if it works as advertised, you go, yeah, exactly. I want the thing that I want to pay attention to, to be front and center. Everything else be in the background. Go ahead, Justin. Sorry. Slow down there. Tom slash Mitt Romney. People can only buy this if businesses are people because this is for enterprise now, and it's going to come in anywhere between 2,500 and 3,000 apparently, at least according to what they were guiding this on. I do agree with you that this is something that is at least a step up from what it was before, which is, I think there could be a documentary about the promo that they initially did to woo investors into this because what it seemed to lead to was almost, and I do not take this comparison lightly, Theranos level BS in terms of what they were promising compared to what they had actually done. This is interesting, although I will say, Tom, you put a lot more faith into a pivot to enterprise with this kind of stuff specifically with AR than I do, because I think it's a very, very convenient place to hide because you can sell for larger, you can sell at deep discounts if you want to move units, and you don't have to really show much of your accounting because a lot of this is done on a B2B level, which is not covered with the same kind of scrutiny that consumer devices are. You can charge really high prices as we see, and that brings in enough revenue to satisfy your investors. So I think it's a good move for the business for sure. And lots of VR headset makers turn to this and are kicking around. Freaking Google Glass is still around because it went enterprise. And this is what I'm saying. It's a great place to hide a thing that you had higher expectations. I mean hide if you're expecting it to be consumer, sure. Because we don't know. Do we know how much Google Glass is doing? We know they're selling, but also Google could sell anything forever considering how big they are. Yeah, but I don't think they'd bother if it wasn't making them somebody. It's not like they're getting a big PR hit out of Google Glass. I don't know. I don't know. Again, we don't know. We don't. Well, before we leave the headset category, a little bit more news that Quest 2's Oculus Move fitness tracking will be available outside the headset on the Oculus Move app for Android and also iOS and also sync with Apple Health on iOS. No mention of any plans to sync with Google Fit, but Meta said it would explore future times. Not gonna say no. The app and the Apple Health integration are both opt-in with end to end encryption. The stats, they say, will not be used for Facebook ads. Peloton said Friday that it's gonna test a new offer to let customers get a Peloton exercise machine without paying anything. But you'll have to pay a higher monthly fee. Right now, the Peloton bikes are between $1,500 and $2,500 depending on the model and the package because you can get your shoes included and stuff like that. And the subscription is $39 a month. Under the new test plan, select Peloton stores in Texas, Florida, Minnesota and Denver are gonna offer the bike for no upfront. You don't have to buy the bike. You just pay somewhere between $60 and $100 a month. They're gonna test out different price points. And you're thinking, what happens if I cancel? Am I locked into a contract? Cancel the subscription? All you got to do is return the bike, no extra charge. Now, it sounds like you might still need to pay for those extras, like the shoes and any mats that you want to put, stuff like that. But new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy, who's the former CFO at both Netflix and Spotify, said that Peloton's gonna spend most of its money in the future on improving digital content offerings and less on selling the hardware like it did in the past. Oh, Peloton, how creative cloud of view. But seriously, I mean, I assume that Peloton says almost, you know, not enough people we think would want to return the bike before the bike is paid for through the subscription model as we've laid it out going forward. So yeah, we might need a little bit of money, but most people will be like, oh, I'll just keep it. It's already here. And you know, I've I've made all you know, I've, you know, moved my guest room around, etc. So yeah, this, I mean, and because they're not selling it, I don't think the like refurb laws apply so they could take that Peloton somebody returns and give it to somebody else, right? Because it's just a rental anyway. Yeah, I very recently just bought my wife a Peloton. I tell you from the perspective as somebody who just bought one, they currently before this, we're very conscious of the fact that moving a gigantic priced piece of machinery is their biggest thing that they need to get people over the hurdle for. They offer payment plans. They offer a very bougie white glove. We will set everything up for you so it doesn't just arrive in a box and you leave it sitting there. It is there ready to go at the point that they put it there. This is an interesting thing. I think it also calms nerves of some Peloton fans who were hearing rumors of a higher subscription fee. But this hopefully is only for people that are getting this free model this freemium, you know, kind of experience as opposed to people that have already paid out of pocket. They need to increase their their install base. They're trying to get over the fact that this is the biggest hurdle. Makes sense to me. Will it work? Well, we'll see. It's just another step down that road of everything in tech being subscription based, right? And what was interesting to me is unlike the kind of faux subscription you get from Apple and Samsung, where you're really just paying off the phone and then there's a trade-in thing that's kind of shuffled in. This one is really like, no, you have the bike while you're subscribing and if you're done, then give it back. Well, we'll give it to somebody else. Well, Peloton has more competition than ever. Peloton is not, there is no, oh, it's just like Peloton, but a different name. I mean, they are offering something that is unique and people like the service a lot and certainly the hardware. But yeah, I think you got to throw some spaghetti at the wall at this point when you're in the subscription exercise space. Yeah, that's the worst part of my wife using her Peloton. She's constantly throwing spaghetti and it's just cause it's a mess. It's very messy. Very weird. It's a weird thing that the instructors call it. It's a cultural, yeah. And throw spaghetti at the wall. Well, they also need to adjust to the fact that they had a gigantic boom through the lockdown and now they need to understand what their post boom, post lockdown future is and it seems to be keeping up with that. It's a new CEO with a new plan. Well, and also, I mean, you know, I could go on and on about this all day, but yeah, there, that is extremely good point. Peloton is not the only company that benefited from everybody being locked inside their houses saying we're tired of throwing spaghetti at the wall and we want to exercise, but to, and that was a necessity for a long time, particularly in certain kinds of weather. Now more and more having the option to like go back to your normal life or your previous life, whatever that was, or kind of stick with the makeshift options that you gave yourself, that is the harder sell. Yeah. Well, folks, you got a hard sell for us. You got thoughts on the Peloton or subscription life. You got subscription fatigue. Tell us all about it in our discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S sub stack. That plucky email newsletter platform released a reader app for iOS and began on a waitlist for Android users. The app can pull in all of your subs, sub stack subscriptions into a dedicated inbox and you can choose to pause email delivery of your subscriptions. If you would just like to read them in the app, you can also add RSS feeds and podcasts. It also has a discovery tab for finding more sub stack newsletters that you might be interested in, but you cannot subscribe at a paid level or upgrade to a paid subscription from within the app. Curious. It also connects to Twitter where you can see what your newsletter creators are tweeting about the company positioned itself against social media platforms saying, quote, we are building an alternative media ecosystem based on different laws. Writers are rewarded with direct payments from readers. Readers have total control over what they read and quote, this is an app for deep relationships and alternative to the mindless scrolling and cheap dopamine hits that lie behind other home screen icons. It offers a quiet space to read where the work itself is given the spotlight removed from status games or other trivial diversion. Wow. Mm hmm. Tech journalist Adam Tinworth pointed out on his one man and his blog that this is a soft form of a lock in adding quote. If your audience is in their inbox, they can switch to ghost or review or down or be hives seamlessly and lose nothing. But if your audience is in sub stacks app as a writer, you risk losing the audience's attention by shifting. I find the sub stack app soothing like a quiet place to read, you know, downloading it. I was like, Oh, this is a nice way. I've forgotten how many newsletters I subscribe to use sub stack. And this was like, Oh, look at that frog pants is on there. Justin's on there. Cool. It allows me to manage my subscriptions. So there was one in there that I didn't realize I was subscribed to that I unsubscribed from the fact that I can't do paid subscriptions. I think is bad for the publishers more than the users, right? And the idea here does seem to be to get the writers to stay on sub stack because of what Tinworth said, you've done the switch from Mailchimp to sub stack yourself, Justin, I've done it from Mailchimp to review the users don't have to notice when you do that unless you tell them. Whereas if they're used to reading you in sub stack and you move off sub stack, they're going to go, Oh, wait, I don't get it anymore. Yeah, I think that that's part of an arms race that all of these are going to have to do. Yeah, the life cycle of how we value email, which you know, it's funny at the point that you know, a few over a decade ago, the question was what will kill email and now we're like, Can we please have better versions of our email? It was the only thing that we really liked. It was pure all along. This is I think a value add for people who have enjoyed what sub stack has brought to the email newsletter world, which largely is clean design and abilities to support writers that I like at a time when things are more unstable than ever in the world of journalism. I don't know exactly what some of their other aims are going to lead to. It feels like they kind of threw in and will be an RSS reader and will be a podcast app, which is never a good thing for either of those two very highly specific features in my although from looking at the app, I feel like it's not obvious how to add an RSS feed. I feel like that may just be something you can do for your newsletter subscriptions like podcast related to the newsletter subscription. I'm not sure. I don't think it's a general purpose thing. No, no, no. And I think that my experience with the app is that it is very, very focused on exactly what it wants to be. I don't see this quite in the same sort of devilish way that some do in terms of it being a soft moat or anything like that. You don't have to take it out of your email. You can always just have your relationship with these writers be via your email. They're offering a different way to do it. And to be totally honest, I agree with you. Sometimes the email newsletters get lost. They're not always in my primary inbox. And I'll come back in and I'll just have a glut of a bunch of stuff. And I'm like, I'm not reading five Jeff Maurer essays at the exact same time. It'd be nice to have a place where I could go that is off social media. So I think it's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, as somebody who emails my least favorite thing, I just get too many of them. I have newsletters that I do my best to siphon into a folder. And these are people that write stuff and do stuff that I do care about. So I don't want to miss it. But I just can't have that in the big old dump of emails that I get every morning and I'm constantly fighting throughout the day. But because of that, it's easy to say like, well, they're all in that folder and you'll get to it when you get to it. There's something about the email ecosystem that I'm like, no, I won't get to it. And I kind of won't. But in another form, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, most of the sub stack writers that I pay the most attention to, I just read on my desktop and that works fine. I've never really thought about reading anything that's a little bit more long form, at least from sub stack on say my iOS device, which is now available. But yeah, it's a good option. I don't I don't really know how you lose I think as a reader, it's a I think you can overstate the moat aspect for the publisher. Remember for the publisher, it's it's a moat because right now, if I if all my audience reads it in their email client of choice, my audience doesn't have to do anything for me to switch providers. If a bunch of them do start reading it in this sub stack reader app, then I have to message them to say like, hey, I'm switching providers. So if you use the sub stack app, it's it's it's a small it's a little moat. You know, you could step over it. You might get your foot splashed a little. That's it's not bad. What I wonder is how many readers want it. And Sarah just laid out the case for it. I think that's that's the case for readers want to get. But will they do that? Or will it be like, yeah, but it's already in my email. I'll just read it there. And they're not forcing it. I think that's true. Well, if you're taking a cruise this year, maybe you're thinking of a cruise in the future. You wouldn't be alone. Cruises haven't gone anywhere, had a law to disruption due to the pandemic. But cruise companies are trying some new things trying to get creative. And Chris Christensen has more. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you haven't been paying attention, while the cruise industry has been interrupted by the pandemic, it hasn't really stopped its plans for growth. And so just in the last couple of weeks, Royal Caribbean announced the world's largest cruise ship, the wonder of the seas. The technology angle for that is there's some new things that they're doing with mobile phones. One of the most interesting is if you've ever done a cruise, you're required by the Coast Guard to do a muster drill, which is a lot of standing around waiting for everybody to show up. And with the new ship, they have a mobile experience where you can learn a lot of the information you needed to know ahead of time on your mobile phone. And then you'll get a time that you'll need to meet with a crew member. You still have some of that. But their goal is to get you, as they say, car to bar in 10 minutes. And they're hoping this technology change will get your vacation started on the right foot. I'm Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. I mean, anything that gets you from the car to the bar faster, I think. Car to bar in seconds flat. It's been so long. I mean, the last time I took a cruise, I was in high school. So there weren't any mobile phones. So I didn't realize that we had mustered drills. Makes sense, though. Well, there we go. Everybody go, always go for the full package, the full drink package. All right, let's check out the mailbag. We got, we have a little comedian in our midst. Frank from Denmark had had, he actually sent us this email and said, you may have made this joke in GDI. I wasn't listening yesterday. We did not Frank Frank in response to our story yesterday about using plants to synthesize music. Frank says, if your plant based synthesizer gets obsolete, is it plant obsolescence? And we actually talked about plant obsolescence in relation to apple. So it's perfect. We never made the joke, though. We missed it. We missed it. But frankly, Frank did not. Frank was there to pick us up. Thank you, Frank from Denmark. The Danes. There's something hilarious in Denmark. They never miss a beat. Thank you. Thank you also to our brand new boss. That new boss is named Molly. Molly just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Molly. Hey, come on, people. Give Molly some applause. Yeah, Molly, Molly. Thanks to, uh, well, Tom, take it. I'd like to thank Len Peralta to Sarah. I know where you're going with this. Len Peralta has been illustrating the show. Len, what do you got for us? Well, uh, I was fascinated by the leap frog discussion from a little bit earlier, especially that part that allows the leap frog to dim the world, which I think a lot of us can kind of appreciate these days. And that's what this image is called. It's called dim the world. It shows a person wearing the leap frog saying, oh, it's beautiful, but not leap frog magically. Oh, magically. I'm sorry. Um, and in the background, it looks like a missile command is going on in the background with some stuff there. It's the it's a it's an apocalyptic background. The world is literally burning behind this man. The world is burning behind this poor gentleman. If you'd like to see this, just become a my patrons, patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store, the old fashioned way it's available right now at Len Peralta store.com. Thank you, Len. Also, thanks to Justin, Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, what's the haps? Oh, the new season of world's greatest con is unfolding as we speak episodes one and two are available right now. The first one covering the 21 scandal, the original quiz show scandals back in the 1950s. And then we move a little bit further in time to cover Michael Larson and the press, your luck story. There's a lot more to it, even if you've only heard that. And I would encourage you guys to go ahead and give it a listen. Great review so far. Thank you to everybody who supported it. Head on over world's greatest con search for it. Wherever you find your podcast hosted by Brian brushwood and produced by dog and pony show audio. Excellent. Well, we are live on the show Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow and Patrick Morgan is going to tell us if it's safe to go shopping for a GPU yet. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this brover.