 Coming up on DTNS, the small old chip at the heart of the chip shortage signal adds cryptocurrency support and whether refresh rate or resolution is better. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 6, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lean. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about college. Alright, not just reminiscing about our old college days, but like, what's important in college? What courses do you need to take? What did we take? And how do we end up doing what we do now? With that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Get up by becoming a Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Entertainment Software Association announced an all virtual E3 2021, which will take place June 12 through 15th. With early commitments from Nintendo, Microsoft, Xbox, Capcom, Konami, Ubisoft, Take Two Interactive, Warner Brothers Games, and Coach Media to present at the show. The essay is targeting an in-person E3 in Los Angeles in 2022. Did not hear you mention Sony interest there. TikTok added automatically generated captions to videos with additional support for English and Japanese. Captions need to be enabled by the creator and can also be edited after they're generated if you need to touch them up, make them a little more accurate. I'll finally end with the US Patent and Trademark Office disclosed that Google acquired the 3D audio startup Dysonix. Protocol reports that some Dysonix staff joined Google several months ago to work on audio hardware. Dysonix spun out of the UC Davis Technology Incubator and originally worked on a motion tracker for headphones, surround sound on in-flight entertainment, and developed 3D authoring software for VR creators. The latest security update for Pixel phones seems to have increased GPU performance, which was something people were slagging on when the Pixel 5 first came out. XDA developers notes that Dirstonderd found a 30-50% performance improvement and Anantek found performance had essentially doubled. The update did note, quote, performance optimizations for certain graphics-intensive apps and games. So that seems to be an understatement. Apple launched an app called Find My Certification Assistant designed for companies who make certified MyFi accessories for iPhones. The app launches on April 4th. Find My helps users find lost Apple devices and can be used to find other things as well. Apple has not yet launched a third-party device program for its Find My network, but the app launch indicates it might soon and also may point to a launch of air tags by Apple. We'll see. Are we going to get an April announcement? Maybe it'll have air tags. Who knows? Alright, let's talk a little more about the Play Store. Yesterday, we mentioned that Google opened up the Play Store to Android Auto apps for your automobile. Well, the first navigation app that isn't from Google, so not Waze or Google Maps, is now available for Android Auto. Sygic, it's spelled S-Y-G-I-C, if you want to go look for it, has more than 50 million downloads from the Play Store. If you use it on a phone, you might already know it. And it can now be added to Android Auto, not just to your phone. Sygic has some things you'd expect from a nav app like maps, directions. It also does user reports for traffic cameras and includes some really nifty augmented reality features in some parts of Europe. Those will show the route direction on a real-world view. Not as good as an actual heads-up view on your windshield, but the next best thing. Speaking of heads-up, the Sygic phone app can actually project a very basic heads-up view on your windshield. It just uses reflection, but it's kind of nifty. Sygic also can do more offline navigation than Google Maps can. Google Maps can do some, but Sygic kind of orients themselves as saying, we do the most offline of any of those apps, so you're just using GPS for the navigation. You don't need to have a data connection. And this is a big deal. A lot of the Android Auto fans out there are very excited that they've got an option now if they don't like Google Maps or Waze. Oh, man. I mean, as a Apple Car user, which I have become, I mean, I really, really, I really love Apple Car. But that's, you know, it was something that it was always on my phone. And now to be able to be part of my vehicle is a thing that said Apple Maps versus Google Maps. Google Maps is just by far the better version. And that's something that I can use with Apple Car. But yeah, I'd love to know, like, what is actually going on with Sygic that makes Google Maps seem not that great? Yeah. Sygic seems to be something that's worth checking out. If anybody doesn't understand, like, well, wait, why can't I just use Sygic on my phone in my car? You can. But you have to mount it somewhere, right? Either putting it in the windshield or in a vent or in your CD tray or something. The nice thing about Android Auto and CarPlay from Apple is that it uses the screen that's built into a lot of cars to be able to, you plug your phone in and it'll just replicate what's on the phone on the screen in a manner that's formatted for that screen. And so you don't have to be taking up something else that's on your dashboard. I never realized. I was calling it Apple Car this entire time instead of CarPlay. But yes. Yeah, you got the idea. Yeah. I mean, the way that this can all be customized for whatever your vehicle is, is it compatible with, you know, certain feature sets. I mean, it really does make a huge difference. And a lot of cars can do both. If you're like, wait, now I have to decide which car supports my system. Not necessarily. A lot of cars do both. Some cars have their own systems, too. So you do have to kind of pay attention to that. But it's getting better. It used to be there would be like my wife has a 2011 Audi. It's got a screen, but the only thing you could do with it are the things that are built into the car. There's no connecting to your phone on it. So we've come a long way. Yeah, my mom has an older Honda as well. And I mean, in great shape. But every time I'm like, Bluetooth, she's like, I can't do that. Not my car. So yeah. Well, something you can do perhaps if you're on Clubhouse anyway, Clubhouse rolled out its first monetization feature called simply Clubhouse Payments. You can find a send money button on a select test group of Clubhouse user profiles. The company is also saying that it is the first of many payment features that it's planning. Payments are processed with Stripe, which charges the sender a small card processing fee, but Clubhouse doesn't take a cut. Not yet anyway. After all, Clubhouse has said in the past, it wants to focus on direct monetization and not add revenue. I guess it's fair to not take a cut when you're just doing it as a test. Gets creators more enthusiastic about it. Although part of me is like, just let him know what you're going to hit him with now. Get him used to it. But the point being that Clubhouse, I think, is taking the tactic of we're not going to build our business on monetizing you. We're going to build our business on monetization between you and the creators that you think are worth paying for, which is a new trend. Patreon, of course, has been doing that for a long time, but there's also fans only and a lot of other companies are moving that way. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing about this is and it remains to be seen how I mean, I kind of feel like Clubhouse is a trendy thing that's going to die out. But the idea of Clubhouse, the idea of paying for a session, an audio session with Elon Musk or Tom Merritt or whoever it is that you think is worth it. I think that's actually a really good monetization strategy. I don't think that's going to be something that becomes a platform. I think it's kind of buzzy stuff, but it is a way for Clubhouse to make money for sure. Yeah, and this is just a tip jar approach. I like what you're saying and that seems to make more sense to me, whether it's Clubhouse or some other platform like Twitter that does it, where there are certain rooms you could just jump in and listen to for free, but there are also exclusive sessions. Like I would absolutely imagine that that's on the Clubhouse roadmap as well. Exactly. Speaking of moving money around, Signal plans to add support for Mobilecoin, a cryptocurrency that is designed to work on mobile devices and also designed to protect privacy. Bitcoin itself is anonymous, but it's not private. You can see everybody's ledger transactions and sometimes that's enough to figure out who's giving money to whom. Mobilecoin hides that, so it introduces some noise. It's almost like a differential privacy approach so that you can't really tell who's sending money to whom on that public ledger. And it also doesn't use a lot of resources, so it's perfect for your phone. Signal users in the UK on iOS and Android will be the first to get to use it, partly because it's not supported in the United States yet. We'll get to that in a minute. Using Mobilecoin means there's no bank record of who sent money to whom. Right now, if you send money through WhatsApp, there's a bank saying, oh, we'll handle the transaction, so they know all that stuff. Using Mobilecoin means nobody knows that stuff. And while more popular cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash also protect your privacy, Mobilecoin uses very little storage space and finishes transactions in seconds, not minutes. And definitely not tens of minutes that get close to an hour. This happens about the same speed that Venmo does. Those are important things on mobile. Mobilecoin is supported by the FTX exchange, but not by Coinbase yet. Mobilecoin is volatile as well. Most cryptocurrencies are, so that value fluctuates quite a bit. That's one problem of like, if I pay a Mobilecoin to Sarah and it's worth a dollar and then two days later it's worth 20 cents, that's going to suck for Sarah. Or if it's now worth $500, then that's going to be great. But that's really not what you want. You want the dollar to stay worth a dollar. So Signal is considering an option for users to exchange cash for Mobilecoin and then back again immediately before and after transactions. They wouldn't become a currency exchange where you'd hold deposits, but they would do a thing where like, I want to send Sarah a dollar. They'd change the dollar to Mobilecoin, send the Mobilecoin to Sarah and immediately change it back to a dollar and then she could cash it out however she wants. That would reduce the effect of volatility and the limited places to exchange them, but they're not doing that yet. Right now it's just sending the coin itself. So if I was a person who's like, okay, maybe I have Signal installed, maybe I don't, but is this a good option for me? It sounds, like you said, pretty volatile. Why is this a good idea? Well, Signal wants to compete with the other messaging apps which are, you know, like WhatsApp, allowing you to send money. But they also want to be true to the nonprofit foundation that runs Signal and Moxie Marlin Spike, who is in charge of that foundation, wants to be true to the principle of privacy. Signal is all about protecting your privacy. So they don't want to get in a situation where I was using Signal, but now the bank is tracking me. And yes, your mind is going to immediately go to criminals, but it also is whistleblowers. And that's what Signal is more concerned with and people in oppressed countries and financial transactions could be a dangerous way to do that. So they want to come with a way to protect the privacy of people exchanging money, but they also want to offer that. Yeah, these, I don't know, it seems like just really early days of the next wave of how we all get to pay for things. That's what this seems like to me is, yeah, it's kind of volatile, but privacy, privacy first, that's good, you know, and the whole crypto thing thrown in. It just seems like, I don't know, this sounds sort of messy to me. But at the same time, I get where Signal is going with this, with what they have offered to them. Yeah, I look at this and I think it's the right principle and maybe they'll make it work. If anybody can make it work, Moxie Marlin Spike and Signal can. But I feel like the world is against them. The world is against financial transactions being private. The world is against using cryptocurrency to keep transactions private because of money laundering and criminal stuff. And Signal says, look, you know, Signal doesn't make it easier for criminals to communicate. It makes it easier for people who aren't criminals to communicate because the criminals already know how to use encrypted stuff. And they're saying the same thing about Mobilecoin, not sure that they can fight those prevailing wins. Hey, folks, you want an ad free feed of Daily Tech News Show? Well, support us on Patreon and get your own personal RSS feed supported directly by you. You can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. The Verges Sean Hollister has an article up today called, Samsung's latest budget phones ask is refresh rate more important than resolution. Sean points out that the OnePlus Nord N100, Moto G50, Galaxy F12, and Galaxy M12 all have 90 hertz refresh rates with screen resolution of just 720p. Apple has offered higher resolution phones since the advent of the Retina display with the iPhone 4, but with 60 hertz refresh rates. So the iPhone 12 with a 60 hertz refresh rate costs $800 or more, with the Galaxy F12 with a 90 hertz refresh rate costing less than $150. Huh, big difference. Granted, there are other considerations, processor power, camera, battery size, all come into play. But Sean also brings up an interesting question, focusing on resolution versus smooth scrolling, which is more important to you? I found that fascinating. And Sean, who is married to my wife's sister, so I always feel like I have to disclose that, not that it really matters here, but Sean was focusing more on Samsung and the new Samsung stuff. But I think it's an interesting question in general, whether the smoothness of the refresh rate is more important than the actual resolution. And the actual resolution, because we talk about resolution, when you're talking about a Retina display, the idea is any resolution better than that, you can't really notice. Whereas the refresh rate, you do notice that. When we talk about 120 hertz refresh rate, we talk about it being buttery smooth, right? And everything just works better. Yeah, and I think, I mean, there are so many folks who say, I want, you know, I paid for this phone, I want to look at it, I want it to be, you know, as crisp as possible. But there are various factors that make it feel that way to you. And the idea that a refresh rate is actually something that it doesn't get the attention that resolution does, you know, when you're talking about specs and people are deciding to pay for something. And the fact that, yeah, like an iPhone at 800 bucks, or another phone at much less than that can actually be as pleasing to the eye as, you know, as either or kind of thing is something that, I don't know, I think that people feel like they need to pay for something that looks good to your eye more than they actually do. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to, we have to bracket off certain considerations, right? If you are doing high resolution video shooting with your phone, or you use your phone in a professional instance that's like, no, I really need high resolution. Well, of course, that's a whole different situation. Or maybe you're like, you know, gaming is super important for me. So refresh rate is everything. Like I need that refresh rate to be be super high. That's a different situation. But for the majority of users who are, you know, text messaging, read and Twitter, maybe watching some videos and stuff. I feel like if you are in a position where you're like, well, I'd much rather spend $150 and $800. This trade off makes sense. As we said, there's other factors, right? But but actually some of these mid-range phones, especially the ones from Samsung have like 6000mAh batteries. Even some of those other factors are closing the gap. If it's not about the camera and it's not about high resolution playback of video or high resolution imagery for you. Basically, if you're not a photographer or videographer, I think that refresh rate will be will affect your daily use of the phone more. Oh, for sure. And I mean, as somebody who, I don't know, what are we five days in of me, you know, being a contact lens where it's like the, you know, what what makes sense for your eyes is what makes sense. I mean, for the last year, I didn't even use my phone unless I absolutely had to because it was hard for me to see refresh rate resolution. I mean, they all play a part. But but yeah, it's it's it's not just it's not just a spec game. It's it's it's truly what works for you. Your eyes. Where do you fall on the refresh rate resolution battle that we just invented? Send us an email feedback. A display driver is it's not a not a driver software driver. Not talking about that. It's a simple little chip. It has a simple job. The display driver is just a little chip that takes instructions from elsewhere like your graphics card. It's not the actual graphics card. It just takes instructions from the graphics card and it turns it into how the display on your device lights up. It's it's the thing in your display that's like here show these points of light at these locations. It doesn't do a lot of heavy processing, but without it you couldn't see your screen right because it's the thing interpreting the signals. Bloomberg has a report analyzing why a shortage in those tiny little display driver chips is at the heart of the wider chip shortage. We've been talking about because without that simple chip, you can't make LCD panels without LCD panels. You can't make TVs. You can't make laptops. You can't make car info displays. You can't even make things like upgrades to airplane cockpits and a whole lot of other stuff. Now we've covered the chip shortage well on previous episodes and how unusual demand patterns, you know, people demanding consumer electronics more than we expected. Getting back into buying cars faster than we expected certainly impacted the chip supply chain and stockpiling and all of that. There were also the storm in Texas impacted chip manufacturing there. Heavy rains in Taiwan, fires in Japan. Those of all combined to make the logistics of all of this difficult. But Bloomberg talked with the CEO of Highmax that makes display drivers CEO Jordan Wu about its display driver business. Highmax designs display drivers to be made on what they call mature, which means old 16 nanometer processes. Remember, we're talking about 10 nanometer Intel chips and seven nanometer and five nanometer ARM chips and AMD chips. 16 nanometers, pretty beefy, but it's fine for a display driver. Those manufacturing lines have been running at capacity for months. Automotive display drivers are particularly squeezed because they're made with eight inch wafers instead of the more advanced 12 inch wafers found in consumer electronics. So you can't just swap in the chips that are meant for a laptop into the cars. That makes it more difficult for the cars. And capacity for display drivers isn't likely to increase anytime soon since companies don't see a lot of upside in building old 16 nanometer processors for a demand that will eventually fall back down. Like why build a whole factory for 16 nanometer when it can only be used for this and that problem is eventually going to go away even if it's not anytime soon. So when will it end? Nobody really knows. Andrew Howe, Acer's president for Pan Asia Pacific Operations told reporters in Taipei that he thinks Q2 will be better than Q1 and the second half of the year will be better than the first half. He's being optimistic, it's not very specific though. Chris Richard, principal in Deloitte's supply chain and network operations practice told Ars Technica, there seems to be a broad consensus that it will stabilize by the end of the year, which is what Acer was saying. But if I go back to 2008 and the financial crisis, it was a couple years after the rebound started that everything smoothed out again. So Chris Richard saying, yeah, maybe it'll start to stabilize by the end of the year, but we might be in this for a while. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how these things go, right? I mean, we've been talking about chip shortages, gosh, for the better part of a year really. Yeah, and various areas of manufacturing that it has affected, this is interesting. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, there's not too much, I think that we can do about it. I mean, if you look at, I don't know, what Chris Richard from Deloitte said, it's just going to take a couple years for everything to stabilize. I think that's true. Yeah, that does make the most sense. Now, last time we talked about chip shortages last week, we were speculating on whether the shortages will drive up the cost of cars. And thankfully, we got some inside info on this from Big Jim. Hi, DTS crew. It is I Big Jim, the trade nerd, and looking through some notes here. Okay, on Thursday, April 1st show, you guys better not be pranking me. There was a discussion about supply chain and logistics and semiconductors and movement of vehicles from auto manufacturers that have finished up production and holding vehicles until they get the correct chips. Will that cause these vehicles to come at a higher cost? Short answer, no, because the automakers live based off of cash flow, and so they need to push those products out as quickly as possible. What we believe will actually occur based upon this would be you would actually see sales just to get those old units off the lot, and then you might see an incentive to buy newer units as well within about, I'd say, six to nine months time. But that's just what our readings show here. Tom, what are your readings show on that side? Jim, that all makes sense to me. My readings are going to be the same, which is, yeah, no, a glut of trucks suddenly showing up because they finally got the chips would probably lead them to, you know, do some holiday sales and rebates and all that kind of stuff. Makes sense to me. Thank you, Jim. Appreciate that. Thanks, Big Jim. It was so good to get some feedback from somebody who's in the trenches. All right, so will I remember him? I mean, he's around. Yeah, exactly. He's teamed up with Honeywell on a $299 face mask. Yeah, I know. But it was created in partnership with Hollywood costume designer Jose Fernandez. He made SpaceX's spacesuits. So these are people who are in the business of making nice things. The Zooper mask, Zooper with an X at the beginning has dual three speed fans, also HEPA filters also has wireless earphones featuring active noise cancelization, a microphone and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity. Oh, so you're paying $299 for Bluetooth wireless headphones. That makes more sense to me. They're just so cool, Tom. They're so attached to them. So yeah, that makes them even cooler, right? Yeah, man. I mean, listen, this, you know, a $300 face mask, that sounds insane to me. But at the same time, it's like, OK, well, if you think of it as, you know, it's, it's, it's something that is a, you know, a style item, but also works well and can be used in conjunction with other things that you needed to, you know, the Bluetooth, it would be one of those things that I would care about. It's, it's OK. They're kind of cool looking. They are cool looking. Well, that's a thing, right? Are they are they $300 cool looking to you, Tom? OK, so you'd spend $300 on a high end like an AirPods, right? Yeah, yeah. I think what turns me away from buying these is I would rather just have the AirPods. I don't, I don't, I mean, it looks cool, but I don't want to have to put that all on every time. But then I, you know what? I do put on a mask and headphones when I took the dog for a walk. So maybe it would be nice to have it all in one like that. It's nice and form fitting. Looks like it's stretchable. I also, I mean, listen, I know we're, we're nowhere near the, the, the moment where no one's wearing masks anymore. I mean, we're going to be doing this for a while, but, but I also feel like, oh, for something that's such an all in one item. Yeah. For that price point and, and, and knowing that people want very much to get into the next phase of their lives. Tough sell. Yeah. I think you can detach the earphones to so that you can wash the mask, which means you could, I guess you could just detach the earphones that use them. Maybe, I don't know. We'll have to look into that part of it. All right. Let's see what's in the mail bag. Let's do it. Arthur in Canada wrote in about a conversation we had on GDI on, on Monday show about objectivity versus subjectivity. Do you objectively like a movie? Or do you subjectively think that something is good or bad? Arthur says, recently I listened to a stuff you know podcast episode where the hosts were laid a story about the 1980s competition between Stallone and Schwarzenegger. It seems that Arnold effectively told a trolled Sylvester and Cisterian in the movie Stopper My Mom Will Shoot. Arthur says, if both potential stars believe that the movie was bad, is it objectively bad? Secondly, yeah, right? Secondly, Arthur says, my fiancee enjoys her bananas when they're very green. A state I would consider subjectively bad. As the banana is yellow and I start to consider them good, she would consider them bad. Beyond that, the banana either becomes an ingredient for bread or muffins or it just decomposes and then the banana will cause illness of eating and then everybody thinks it's bad. Must be fair to say, don't eat that. It is bad at that point. Arthur says, I can't help but believe that the rotten banana of movies exists somewhere. Thank you, Arthur. No, Stallone and Schwarzenegger alone do not make enough to call something objectively bad. Those are just two opinions. Our conversation on GDI was all about is such a thing as like people often say like this movie is objectively bad when I don't think they can say that. I think some things that some people think are bad other people think are good, but I do agree with Arthur that there are at the end of the bell curve. There are the rotten banana of movies that we can 99% of us can agree are bad. And yes, don't eat the banana if it's rotten. It's not a good idea. Or just put a banana bread. It's fine. Is there a point after which it's like not even good enough for banana bread? Probably, yes. I think yes. The banana can get rotten enough that it would not even be good for banana bread. But hey, you know, if it goes south, you can always put it in a muffin or something like that. Hey, if you have feedback for us, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. And we thank you so much in advance. We love to get your feedback. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels. Today they include John Adwood, Daniel Dorado and Phillip Lass. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Volkai, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you to our new boss. Yeah, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern in 2030 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We'd love to have you if you can make it and we'll be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.