 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listeners, thanks to all of you, including Ken Hayes, Philip Shane, Paul Boyer and Ditch Doctor. On this episode of DTNS, we break down the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Apple and see, does that one have a better chance than Epic's similar but more limited case? Plus Neuralink, it's impressive. But is it doing anything new? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 21st, 2024 in Los Angeles Anyway, I'm Tom Merrill. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, what a show we have today. Intrigued lawsuits. Apple under antitrust in the U.S. Bisset on all sides. A horrible, no good, very bad Thursday for the old Apple. Yeah. Rotten Apple. Is it? Is it a rotten apple? We're gonna find, we're gonna push on that skin and see how much. Real quick, before we get to anything else, Threads opened its beta, Rob. We were talking about them integrating with the Fediverse and giving a talk on that. So if you're in Canada, Japan and the U.S., and you're older than 18, you can share your posts to Mastodon and anywhere else in the Fediverse. Now, the rest of the quick hits. Oh, congratulations, Reddit. You're officially a public company. You can go find their stock under the ticker symbol RDDT. The company priced its initial public offering at $34 per share. That was at the top of the range. They had said 31 to 34. So it says, you know what, we got enough interest. We're gonna get as much as we can out of this. That is $6.5 billion in valuation down from $10 billion a couple of years ago, but everything's down. It's the first major social media company to IPO since Pinterest did it in 2019 and one of the very few venture-backed tech deals of the past couple of years. After publicly announcing a ban on the importation, sale and use of consumer hacking devices like Flippers to crack down on Carthus in Canada, the Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada department clarified its stance. The intention is to ban the illegitimate use of wireless devices used during Carthus. The ISED will move forward with measures to restrict the use of such devices to legitimate actors only. So no ban on Flipper Pro. And you also, you couldn't steal cars already. So, yeah, there's that. The U.S. Senate heard a classified briefing on the risks of TikTok that are being used to justify a bill that would order bike dance to sell the U.S. part of that business or face a prohibition against its distribution there. After the briefing, senators indicated they might schedule a public hearing. Senate Majority Leader Schumer has not committed to a floor vote. Really hasn't commented on the bill at all. That is a slower and frankly more normal pace for a bill than what happened in the House where they got the same kind of briefing and moved swiftly to an overwhelming passage. And if you don't understand how the U.S. works, Senate must also pass a bill before it can be sent to the president to sign it into law. Doordash announced today that is expanding its partnership with Alphabet's Wing to bring its drone delivery pilot to the United States. Select users in Christianburg, Virginia will be able to order eligible menu items from their local Wendy's located at 2335 North Franklin Street. Doordash users near the address can select the new drone delivery option on the checkout page. So long as they have a small clearing on their property of about two meters in diameter in order for the delivery drone to set things down. So take 30 minutes to deliver it. You have to live within 30 minutes of Wendy's, but still, but also salute to the 2355 North Franklin Street Wendy's in Christianburg, Virginia for just getting so much publicity. Yeah, they are out of French toe sticks. YouTube TV has begun rolling out multi view on iPhone and iPad feature went live on TVs last year. It lets you watch up to four channels at once and choose one of them to have the audio. Android users are still going to have to wait a couple of months, so they won't get it in time for March Madness. Microsoft also had a big announcement today. Rob, what did they say? Huge announcement. So at a virtual event this morning, Microsoft announced its first AI powered surface PCs featuring a dedicated co-pilot key on the keyboard that enables users to pull up the chatbot. The Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 are powered by Intel's Core Ultra CPUs with integrated RGPUs and a neural processing unit, aka NPU for AI tasks. The Surface Pro 10 for business comes with either a Core Ultra 5, 135 U or Core Ultra 7, 165 U with a starting spec of 8 gigabytes of RAM, 256 gig Gen 4 SSD with the price starting at $11.99. The Surface Laptop 6 for business can be equipped with a Core Ultra 5, 135 H or Core Ultra 7, 165 H. The base model starts at $11.99 and comes with 8 gigabytes of RAM, a 256 gig Gen 4 SSD as well. Both models are slated to release this spring exclusively to commercial and business customers. Yeah, in fact, I saw Ars Technica was saying you can, if you're a business customer, you can talk to your corporate representative to put in your order now and I think April 6th they'll probably start shipping these things. But I'm curious, Rob, like you've worked in the industry and this is not unusual for Microsoft to have business-only versions of their hardware, but they usually kind of follow more quietly the consumer stuff. Why the other, doing it the other way around, do you think? Yeah, I thought about that myself and I actually was talking with a buddy and he said one of the reasons is because Windows 10 end of life is coming up and there's a lot of hardware that you're not going to be able to run Windows 11 and further operating systems on. So Microsoft is definitely intentional about making sure, hey, we've got new stuff you need to start upgrading just so you can make sure you stay up to date with our latest greatest software. I think that there's also just a reality of the shifting world for these kinds of devices that there is. I had a situation literally on this show a few weeks ago where my old MacBook died and I got the new MacBook. It was due for an upgrade, but part of the reason why the old one died was because I was trying to do really, really pro stuff with a MacBook that only had the USB-C connections. Now that is very user-friendly. It's very sleek and it looked very nice. I got my new one and I'm like, oh wow, these unsightly but very useful HDMI plugins and MagSafe chargers and an additional place to plug in for audio. It is a pro market now and nobody sells to enterprise like Microsoft. Yeah, and these models are going to have enterprise-friendly stuff. Your trusted platform module is going to be hardware not firmware. The interesting thing is Microsoft has a consumer announcement coming in May, May 20th. We are likely to see these same surface models running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X when that comes around. So that's another difference here as well. A couple other notes that Microsoft announced. Windows users now have access to co-pilot in Microsoft 365. You select the work option in Windows 11 and some updates to the adaptive line of accessible peripherals. The adaptive mouse is back with thumb support and you can print custom tails through shapeways. A new dual button is available for the adaptive hub, as is the adaptive joystick button, which is really just a whole joystick. It looks kind of like an old Atari controller. And there's a Surface Pro keyboard that has brighter backlighting, bolder text and of course like all new Microsoft keyboards, the co-pilot key. I kind of wonder why did Microsoft ever get rid of all of their peripherals and stuff in the first place? It just seems like it stopped for a minute and now they're coming back with stuff. So that's kind of interesting. But yeah, it's interesting. I looked at a lot of the announcement earlier today. Microsoft is all in on AI. They are all in on co-pilot. You're going to see that thing branded everywhere with everything that's coming out from that company for the foreseeable future I would have to imagine. Yeah. And that's what we're going to get more of in May 20th too, so it's not going to stop. I mean, and why wouldn't they? Aside from Azure, this is the thing that has defined an extraordinary run for that company. And as a lot of the tech world adjusts to where we're going, and it looks like that is a position away from advertising, you look at Microsoft's rivals like Google and Meta and say, all right, this is a product that people are going to subscribe to that has become something that the API will likely be something that will be baked into everything that we use going forward. They want to make sure that the mind share is in Microsoft's control. Yeah. And can we pour a little out for the menu key though? Because that's where the co-pilot key goes. Although when's the last time anyone, not just us, anyone. Not only don't I use that key that is right here on my keyboard. I probably couldn't have told you what it was until about four or five months ago when we started hearing that this one. It's really been more like two or three months that we've heard that the co-pilot key was coming. And that's, oh, that's what that thing is down there. I just, I've never used it. At least I remember using it. You know, we talked a bit about the co-pilot key when it first was announced that it was coming on. And I do think that Microsoft's got this sort of hair trigger of like, oh, what's our priority? We'll make a button. Great job, Johnson. We're definitely doing it. But I would not be shocked if you just have permanent elements of chatbot AI just on everything going forward. If not, you know, I think there's a non-zero chance that in five years, the way we think of UI is going to be more like just interacting with natural language. Yeah. In fact, I'm going to call it now. Within the next 20 years, the co-pilot key will be replaced by the brain computer interface key because that is another area that folks are developing stuff in. I would actually replace it with the segue key, but please go on. That's actually, so speaking of segue, let's talk about Neuralink. Neuroscience startup Neuralink live streamed an interview Wednesday with 29-year-old Nolan Arbaugh who has been unable to move his arms or legs since an accident eight years ago where he dislocated or dislocated his fourth and fifth vertebrae. He was the first person to get Neuralink's brain computer interface implanted this past January. On the stream, he demonstrated himself controlling a cursor by thinking to play chess in the game civilization. Significantly, he was able to move the cursor while also talking. Arbaugh says the device can be used for up to eight hours between charges. The battery is charged through the skin by wireless inductance and communicates with a smartphone for processing. Neuralink uses 1,024 electrodes across 64 threads to detect brain activity. Arbaugh says he was released from the hospital a day after the surgery. By the way, I'm pretty sure if I read this right, he found the eight hour limit by playing civilization, which is, you know, that speaks to total game or the classic gamer move. Neuralink has not published a lot of information publicly about what it's doing. So it's kind of hard for other scientists in the field to evaluate how different it is from the many. If you're not aware, there are many similar brain computer interfaces being developed out there. They just don't get as much press because Elon Musk isn't involved in their company. So what has been demonstrated in this video appears to replicate a lot of past research. For example, Stanford University scientists have used two small sensors in the brain to convert thoughts about writing words into text on a screen. They have published full details of that. There's a company called Synchron, S-Y-N-C-H-R-O-N. They implanted their BCI in a patient in a less invasive method than Neuralink uses, though they are probably not capturing as much data because it is less invasive because it's farther up above the brain. Again, it's hard to compare when you don't get the data from Neuralink, but it was good to see this demonstration to show that, yeah, this is in fact a viable product and it is competitive. It is right in there with the other brain computer interfaces being developed. This reminds me in a way of how Apple does stuff. Apple rarely does anything first. It's just that when they do it, it tends to be pretty decent and Earth becomes aware of it. And that's kind of what's happening here, once again, because the owner of this company also makes spaceships in electric cars. So it's just, you know, there's a lot of mindshare that comes over to it. So, but as we said, absolutely no, they are not first and they're not even necessarily furthest along, but it is really interesting just to see where this space is going to go. I don't know how helpful it is for us to parse where people are in this field at this time, to be totally honest with you. Obviously, Elon Musk is a paragraph, not two words. Everybody has their opinions. And so that's going to follow no matter what. But we just saw this happen with AI where we assumed that Google, which had spent a tremendous amount of money, had not one but two teams dedicated to it. And a lot of the researchers that led in the academic world on this field in their building for years that we just kind of assumed they were about 10 years ahead of anybody else. And then all of a sudden, ChatGPT sets the world on fire and now they're thought to be at least maybe conservatively a year behind, depending on what 2024 has in store for open AI. This is a field that by its very nature is going to go and fits and starts for everybody's benefit, including the companies. Either they are going to do exceptional things that change our opinion on how much we want our brain augmented. And this is a great example of one where you take somebody that now has a capability that they would have never had in the past, or you're not going to hear nothing. And that is a very good benefit, because obviously augmenting our brain is something that is extraordinarily complicated and is fraught with a lot of different, you know, challenges both ethically and medically. Yeah, I think I try to make sure people know because Neuralink gets so much press, it would be easy for someone who isn't really reading as much as we have to read to prepare for DTNS to think, oh, Neuralink, they're the only ones doing this. So I try to make sure people know they are far from the only ones doing this. They certainly aren't even the first ones doing this. And I try to let people know, in fact, we kind of really don't know what they're doing because they don't publish a lot of information the way other more academic oriented efforts do. That doesn't mean they aren't doing something good. It just means we don't know. And today, I'm willing to give the credit of like, hey, we saw an actual demonstration. Yeah, I'd like to have more published details. But this is good. This is what we want to see is an actual person with the implant showing us what it can do. But to your point, Justin, given all of that, it's way too early in this game to know whether Neuralink is ahead or behind or whatever, because the advances can come fast and furious, right? Certainly a mile at a time. Exactly. Well, I mean, amongst family, of course, we what we have seen in a AI era, and I do believe this is a space to watch that this is a rubber meets the road era. This is not a conceptual era. This is not a scholarly era. What we saw with and we will continue to see with with these AI APIs is that things are going to work. They're going to move at a faster speed, the likes of which that we really haven't seen since the debut of the internet or the worldwide web, the popularization of it through the 90s or the smartphone and app revolution through the late odds and 2010s, in my opinion. And it's hard to tell. This could be AI, like you're talking about. It could also be autonomous cars where we just make very slow progress and people are very concerned about safety. But the nice thing about this is you have some very good, as they demonstrated here, with someone who had no control of arms and legs, very good medical uses that you can start to demonstrate immediately. So there's use to it now. I do think that AI does make this stuff go faster, though, not only Neuralink, but also driverless cars that that's part of the reason why we're going to see a lot of stuff move a lot quicker. It's a race for gray cells, not pink slips is what you're saying. Yes. Hey, folks, do you want to criticize that joke post on our subreddit? Or you could just tell us what you want to hear us talk about on the show. We get lots of great folks, some of whom are in Antarctica. DJ Fission posts links to our subreddit from Antarctica. If he can do it, you can do it. Get over there to our subreddit, dailysacknewshow.reddit.com. Salute to Craig! You know, Thursday started out so well for Apple. Tim Cook appeared in front of a cheering crowd that had lined up for hours to get into Apple's second largest newest flagship store in Shanghai, China, where you might think, you know what, maybe they don't like the Apple so much anymore, but they do. Cook even got favorable coverage in the ultra nationalist global times of China, first saying some nice things about China's supply chain factories. Now, it started to get a little annoying when Epic announced its third party app store in the EU wouldn't charge developers anything for the first six months, take that Apple and only 12% after that and not take a cut of in-app payments made through non-Epic methods. It got more annoying, however, when Meta, Microsoft, X, Spotify and Match Group joined Epic in filing a petition with a US court objecting to how Apple complied with that court's ruling saying they had to let developers use a button or link to direct customers to external payment methods. All of them are saying the way Apple is following this court order is not sufficient, but that wasn't the worst of it in the US, was it, Rob? It was not because Apple got sued by a lot of folks today. The US Department of Justice in 17 states fought a lawsuit New Jersey federal court against Apple Thursday, alleging that Apple's smartphone policies are in abuse to its market position and violates antitrust law. The complaints say Apple's policies prevent competitors from offering innovative services in spaces like digital wallets, limits the functionality of competing hardware, and makes it unnecessarily difficult for consumers to switch to other platforms like Android. Okay, let's work through the broad accusations here and then talk about what we think the chances are, what we think the implications are. First, the accusation that Apple does not allow global cloud mobile game services like Microsoft Game Pass as apps in the app store. Apple requires them to have a separate app for each game on their service, which is totally unworkable. So that's one accusation. That is anti-competitive. Apple does not support the full standard for text messaging. So not so much about RCS. They spent more time in the filing talking about not allowing competing messaging apps like WhatsApp or Google's messages to use SMS. Only the Apple Messages app can use SMS. Apple restricts many programs in super apps. The filing quotes an unnamed Apple manager saying that letting apps become the main gateway where people play games, book, a car, make payments, etc., would quote, let the barbarians in at the gate. So you can have a super app, but they kind of restrict it to make it less useful. Apple does not allow alternate apps to access tap to pay. So if you're going to use Apple pay, you're using tap to pay. That's the only way you can use tap to pay. Financial institutions, developers can't get access to that. And Apple restricts compilability of competing smartwatches, not allowing things like notifications or messages. So these are all examples of what Apple of ways that the Department of Justice says Apple is abusing their dominant position in the marketplace. But you're going to have to show that Apple has a dominant position in the marketplace, right, Justin? What do you think of this case and what the significance of this is? So in terms of the case, it is a greatest hit of things that people have been mad at Apple about over the last five years. Many of these have been their own lawsuits. You mentioned the Epic Games, a situation that has played out over the last few years. What's interesting about it is that question you just brought up. Can the Department of Justice prove that iOS is not just an operating system that Apple uses to run their extraordinarily popular and expensive hardware, but it is a marketplace? On one hand, you have Apple's tried and true arguments that we sell at a premium, a device that works, that does not have the complications that competing platforms have. Oh, by the way, Android's available. You're never going to hear Apple talk more about Android than you will defending themselves during this particular lawsuit. But we need to restrict these things because we need to make sure that our hardware works. Now, what they will probably think in the back of their mind is that you can pry our control from our cold dead hands. We will only let things up as much as you force us to do it because we know that it never comes back. Anything that we let up will be gone forever from our control. And so you will have to force us to make these changes. But on the other hand, you have a question that I do think is prescient, specifically as we talked about TikTok. We who have followed these stories for a long time and remember a fruitful period of our lives for which iOS did not exist. And the world moved along fine. We need to understand that iOS is something that brings in a tremendous amount of money. And that will be on the Department of Justice side is that what Apple brings in through the listing of apps and stuff like that is gigantic. And if that's not a marketplace, then what is in the same way that you can look at TikTok and say 177 million people watching video on a device? How is that not similar to not only a television network, but a network of television networks? And that is prohibited from foreign ownership. So we might be just at a reckoning point for a lot of this technology to say, do we need to think of how these tech how this tech is now and not in the nascent era where we watched it explode over the last 20 years? I don't think it is beyond the pale for folks in the Department of Justice to actually look over across the pond at our friends over in the European Union and say, OK, how did you guys make these arguments on some of these things? Because right now, because of certain laws over in the EU, Apple just functions differently there. There are things that can happen recently on iPhone and iPad that couldn't before because of laws that were passed there, sometimes similar to some of the things that we're talking about here. So I just wonder if I want to look and say, well, this is how this argument was made there. Let's see if we can't make a similar argument here if you are a lawyer at the DOJ. It is interesting though, to your point, Justin, it's like Apple, they've always been a closed garden. This is our own thing. How are you going to tell me what we're going to do with our thing? Do we have to build something to allow others to profit from our thing, or can we build something to allow ourselves to profit from our thing? That is, to me, in my opinion, going to be a big part of this argument. Yeah, it's about size. If this is a small device with a few customers, it's clear. Think of yourself. If you made a device and the law came and said, well, you have to let everybody have access and provide them APIs and you'd be mad. You'd be like, no, I made the device. I'm making the software. I don't want to let anyone else have it. Apple does let everyone else have access to it, but they put restrictions on that. And the question is, do we have a choice? Can we go somewhere else? And I think that's where the most compelling part of this filing is, is the argument that once someone's in the Apple ecosystem, they are dissuaded from changing. I was just hearing a guy on the Korean Pizza Club livestream earlier this week saying, yeah, I'm on iPhone because I can't switch. Everything I do is in iPhone. I don't want to move to Samsung. I don't want to move off of iPhone. A lot of people have that opinion. That's going to be the compelling thing is that Apple has made it so it's difficult for you to move to Android. This wouldn't work in Europe where Android is the predominant operating system. In the United States though, it's like 62% of the marketplace. And in the filing, what they're saying is it is 70% of the marketplace by revenue. So, you know, they're trying to get the bigger number, but either way, it is a big part of this marketplace. And they're going to try to show that Apple is abusing that dominant position. It doesn't have to be 100% to be in a monopoly. It just has to be able to abuse that position. And I think this is a well written case. It is a very compelling case. I don't know enough about the law to know about whether it is legally sound, whether a court is going to look at this and say, yeah, no, that is now a monopoly in the sense that AT&T was a monopoly. And so, not that they're going to break up Apple, but they're going to require it to be open. I will say that I have always felt that iOS should work the way Mac OS works. Allow a high wall to keep people safe, but people who know what they're doing and are willing to take the risks to go over the wall, get third-party apps, do things that they want with the operating system. And legal or not, if this case forces Apple to do that, I'll be happy. Might make me actually look in an iPhone. Look, it could work the other direction. And just so you know, if you want a little bit more about my thoughts on this, I typed it up in the free tech newsletter. You can go get that at freetechnewsletter.com. Speaking of email, let's check out the mail. Jason wanted to comment on our discussion with Patrick yesterday about the trend towards multi-platform game development. He writes, I was listening to your discussion around platforms that specifically they're exclusive. A component of this conversation that is missing and I think is important is that IP itself, a consistent motivator for the platform companies that are also publishers are in the continuing to support the IP's value. Microsoft and Mojang continues to release regular updates for Minecraft, a single purchase game because they make a significant amount off of the IP itself. This incentivizes the continued excellence for the support of those games. Each of the other console makers have at least one such property that comes to mind. Halo, Zelda, Last of Us, etc. I don't know that we have much to fear from cross-platform releases. If anything, maybe they'll leverage those broader reaches to publish more of those titles we love so much. Interesting. And then we got a different perspective from Brian on the same issue. Brian says, Game Pass is a service, not a platform. Patrick and I were having a little debate about that. Brian says, as long as the other platform holders, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, etc., take a 30% cut of sales and subscriptions, it will remain cost-prohibitive to have Game Pass on other platforms. Since Game Pass would be a direct competitor to games sold on PlayStation, for instance, it seems unlikely that Sony would want to cut Microsoft any kind of deal or exception. Basically, Microsoft can afford to run Game Pass on Xbox because they are the platform holder. As soon as other interests start taking a cut of subscriptions, the margins become too slim. At least for the foreseeable future, Microsoft wants Game Pass to be the differentiator that exclusive games are for Nintendo and Sony, not a new platform in and of itself. Thank you, Brian. In Pittsburgh, I actually, you know, it is interesting that Xbox Game Pass is available on the Nvidia Shield, right? But it's not available on Sony. It kind of kind of shows you a difference in the size of the platform as well. Well, Justin, Robbie Young, thank you as always for being with us today. We love getting your insight here, and people can get your political insight every, almost every day of the week, anyway. Almost. Politics, politics, politics. Tell folks more about that. Well, friends, of course, it is the political season, and there's a little bit of a lull right now. So, on Wednesday's edition of the show, I did something that I'm not really comfortable with. I get a lot of questions about whether or not what would happen if either Donald Trump or Joe Biden died before Election Day. It's gross and macabre. I don't like talking about it, but I did on Wednesday's show. Any question that you might have about that subject, go ahead and listen to the program. Politics, politics, politics, wherever you find your podcast. Another topic you may have heard come up on politics, politics, politics was TikTok and patrons stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Justin has changed his mind on whether the TikTok ban would happen or not. And now that we see the Senate's reaction to the security briefing, we mentioned that earlier in the show. What does he think? Stick around and find out. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com, four slash live. We'll be back tomorrow talking about the Waymo experience and what people can expect with Nicole Lee.