 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, and high-tech Oki. Coming up on DTNS, the downside of energy-saving thermostats, why Johnny Ive and Apple finally split up, and our comprehensive timeline of Elon Musk and Twitter will help you make sense. The whole debacle, it might have just been a chance for me to say the word debacle. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 13th, 2022 with Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In debacle central, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. A man whose job is to prevent this from being a debacle, Roger Chang. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. At CES 2021, LG teased a rollable smartphone just before it announced its exit from the smartphone market. You may have remembered those came fairly close to each other. A company then sold its prototypes to employees, one of which posted a video of a working rollable unit. It shows a rather slim foldable phone able to be unfurled using a hardware or software toggle. The LG will probably never come to market as an LG. Oppo showed off the Oppo X 2021 rollable concept last year. Still looked really cool. TikTok will introduce content levels, a new system to restrict mature content from teen viewers. TikTok will also introduce the ability to filter out videos using designated words and hashtags. An early version of content levels will launch in the coming weeks. The Magic Leap 2 AR will launch on September 30th. Those are words that many years ago I would never have believed I would say. Not the least of which because it's got a 2 in the name. The Magic Leap 2 AR will start at $3,299 and if you're a developer, you'll pay $4,099. You get extra stuff with that though. The headset offers up to a 70 degree field of view, resolution of 4K at 30 frames per second or 1080p at 60 frames. Inside it has an AMD quad-core Zen 2 chip and anyone could buy the headset but Magic Leap is marketing them for enterprise use hence the higher price tag. Definitely pricing them for that. Alphabet CEO Sunder Pichai informed Google employees the company would slow hiring for the rest of 2022. The company will still hire for engineering, technical and other critical roles they say but Pichai said the company will have to work with greater urgency, sharper focus and more hunger. So they're getting rid of the chef? I don't know how the hunger part really threw me at it. Nothing the company announced the phone one. Now you'd be forgiven if you thought they'd already announced it since they announced something about it pretty much every day for the past two months leading up to this but if you missed those pre-announcements it's an Android 12 phone, 120Hz OLED display, semi-custom Qualcomm Snapdragon 778 SOC, two rear 50 megapixel camera sensors with wide and telephoto lenses and support for wireless and reverse wireless charging. As already shown it has a transparent back with integrated LEDs that can be customized for notifications starting at £399 going on sale July 21st in the UK, Europe, Australia, India and a few other countries but we know a lot of you are in the US, the US is not one of those other countries. Oh I was hoping we would have nothing, get it? We won't get nothing. Oh wait, that double negative finally works. I know. Oh my gosh. Let's talk about your smart thermostat. You have a smart thermostat Scott? I do, I've got the turtle one, I forgot the brand. Oh B and no B, Ecobee, Ecobee. Ecobee, yeah okay. Well, in the winter you may be causing a problem with it. Engineers at Cornell have paper coming in the journal Applied Energy called unintended consequences of smart thermostats in the transition to electrified heating. So one of the premises here is a lot of folks are switching from natural gas heat to electric heat in order to be able to take advantage of renewable energy sources like solar and wind etc. Smart thermostat users can choose to share their anonymous data with electrical utilities for research purposes. So Lee and Zhang, the authors of this study, were able to examine wintertime data for more than 2,200 homes in New York State. Here's what they found. One thing was that homeowners tend to use factory defaults and therefore they don't save as much energy as they could. They save between 5 and 8% off their bill when customizations might bring that number to 25 to 30%. Their study also showed that while smart thermostats do lower overall energy consumption they also, and I quote, severely increase the winter peak heating demand through load synchronization during the early morning hours when solar energy is unavailable. In other words this isn't that smart thermostats talking to each other but they all have pretty much the same default behavior and as we just heard people don't change the default behavior so they're all doing the same thing at the same time. And smart thermostats often are turning down the heat at night when you're asleep and you don't feel it and then slowly ramping it back up so the house is warm when you wake up. That saves you energy but maintains your comfort. However, as more homes get smart thermostats it causes a spike in energy usage in the morning as all those start ramping up. The study found that peak heating demand in early morning hours was 40% higher than previously estimated and that winter peak usually comes when solar is unavailable because in the winter at 6 a.m. you got no sun. That means wind and fossil fuels have to step in to meet the demand. So good news that wind could still meet the demand but you don't have as much wind so you end up burning more fossil fuels because of this peak, right? The lower energy usage is still there overall but you're causing a bunch of use at one particular time which means you're increasing fossil fuel use. The authors also provide an open source toolkit for analyzing this kind of data in other regions besides New York if folks want to step in and try to replicate their results. It almost feels like the perfect analogy for complication in the sense that in a vacuum one person buys a smart thermostat or a small number of people do and you can see those immediate savings more if you know how to customize the thing but the problem is you're going to end up in a pattern with a lot of people like you and you're all going to spike at the same time. Hard to foresee that necessarily. I mean maybe they could have or maybe this is only an issue now that the uptake on the technology is so much greater than it used to be. More people have these in their homes than ever and new homes go in with them for the most part or a lot of them do. So I guess I'm not surprised to see that we're running into this but as far as solutions what the heck do people do? I mean it may have to come from the software level or the I don't know what level but people at home are like I don't want to manage this any more than I have to. The whole idea was that it was easy and it's on my phone and I have to think about it. Now you may have to think about it. You may have to figure out how to stagger. Do communities say well look anybody within this zip code or within this area code or however you want to break it down you need to be doing this at 8 and the rest of you at 9 like that gets complicated and hard to manage and you have a scale problem so I don't know if there's an easy answer or an easy solution. I think there are answers. They may or may not be easy but they're policy answers which can be easy or difficult depending but S. Kelly 2909 in our chat points out it's a common issue with scheduled jobs and computers and Nick with a C says shouldn't a smart thermostat be smart enough to know to avoid the spikes and the answer is yes with both of them. I take part in a plan with LADWP that I allow them for a credit on my bill to adjust my thermostat during the summer when there's peak AC demand so they'll go in and they'll like they'll nudge it up a little bit and it'll get a little hotter in the house but they do it in a way that's like it's gonna maintain your comfort level it's just gonna make sure that we're all kind of you know getting a little little less energy usage in that peak time you could do something like that in the winter as well and like Nick suggests have the smart thermostats actually be able to understand oh there is peak energy that we would all be using let's get anonymized data that tells when that is and we can adjust so that the peaks come at a little different time and flatten that curve out a little bit. Yeah I'd like that idea a whole lot and the idea of that working would require some cooperation between power companies both the those run by states and those run by independent corporations to communicate in some way that could be standardized so that all these devices could like you said read from that data and respond accordingly I really think that's probably the answer that one seems tricky but not undoable because you can get rid of the smart thermostats altogether but then you've increased overall energy use because they do reduce demand that's the thing they found is they reduce the energy usage it's just we found this one little quirk that causes a spike here so if we can fix that we get the reduced energy usage and everything else is better too interesting study and when Roger nice job finding this. Yeah it's really good it's definitely one of those things where step forward a couple of tweaks don't step back we'll figure this out New York Times they've got some sources they say Apple and Johnny Ives design firm Love From as the name of his design firm have ended their contract oh man if you thought they're already broken up it's official now Love From signed to deal with Apple in 2019 which made Apple its primary client and restricted it from taking on work that might be deemed competitive so Samsung or you know think other competitive markets that Apple might be in I've had reportedly consulted on the design of the Apple car the Apple mixed reality headset and also reported the clash with development team sometimes on those and other teams Apple's COO Jeff Williams will continue to manage Apple's design teams Evans Hankley will lead industrial design and Alan Dye will lead software design so hey that everyone's favorite couple they're finally calling it quits they're done yeah you knew when when when I've moved out of the house that they were going to try to make that relationship work but it was it was going to be hard so I don't think it's a shock to anybody I wondered and Stokes world basically said the same thing in our chat room just now but I wondered just how much of Ives work was being used because it sounds and again I don't know I'm not inside but it sounds like he was pushing for things that they would go okay but that's not really practical or that's not really the vision some of this is helpful but I never got the sense that they were like ah and and here's another one of those love from designs that happen you know they didn't play it up like they would have otherwise and plus it's against Apple's culture to play up outside help so I kind of feel like Apple was always going to be like yeah you know what we're just going to design it in house from now on Johnny which means now you're going to get a bunch of other companies trumpeting the fact that they've got love from designs by Johnny Ive yeah oh yeah for sure like it's there in some ways it's probably a relief for him because he can jump out to markets he couldn't previously and in some ways this is just the stopping of Apple's kindness toward a man who's who's design sensibilities and the teams he helped lead really did define the look and feel of that company with their great come back in the late 90s throughout the 2000s deserves a lot of credit for that stuff like amazing amount of credit there's a reason why we look at him go oh Johnny Ive he's the the lord of all design teams but at the end of the day you know even though we may still be looking at computers that are a lot like Johnny Ive's original designs to some of those changes aluminium shelves all the notebooks as he would put it you know the iMac and it's general changed changes in the intervening years you know his influence clearly stayed and is still there in terms of overall design aesthetic but I think moving forward they probably can make this work and have it be amicable and he can head on his way and do his awesome work for other people and Apple can continue down the path they're on and I just don't I guess what I'm saying is it's not like tomorrow we're gonna get big clunky beige boxes for Max it's not gonna it's not gonna go away but you know it is also I think important to honor this period that he was there because without his you know his design I'm not sure we would have the same at least the same Apple we have today so props for that but time to move on yeah and he probably is the kind of person that needed to be in from the ground up to really benefit a team and being an outside consultant doesn't really give him that opportunity so in the end Apple said Ive had enough I was afraid that joke was going to come up I was more afraid it was going to come from me I'm really glad that it came from you and not me because I know you know I know how these jokes can go for days and days and days and I would be getting cheesed on Twitter but no it's Tom you want to talk to so yes we need help we need help people we need your help promoting next week special guest week we've got great guests and we would like you to help us tell everyone about them Jack Reissider from Dark Net Diaries is going to be on the show Will Smith from Fuviar formerly have tested Quinn Nelson from Snazzy Labs Joel Telling the 3D printing nerd it's a don't miss week and it's the week to get your friends to be like hey check out Daily Tech News Show they got some cool folks so if you could please get out there wherever you tell people about things Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Be Real whatever it is tell folks they check out special guest week on Daily Tech News Show all next week Twitter has filed a lawsuit in Delaware the state of Delaware against Elon Musk because he no longer wants to buy Twitter if you guys may have heard of this for those following the sockets worth catching up on and you know what happened before because it's hard to remember or even keep track of it all honestly so previously on Elon Musk and Twitter yeah I really think this is going to help put things into perspective just remind you of things that you forgot about we begin with the prelims wherein Musk buys a piece of Twitter just a big old bite of it just a little taste March 14th Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter stock making him the largest individual to be a shareholder and the second largest overall shareholder behind Vanguard Group then he didn't tell anyone about it so he did it on March 14th but nobody knew about it March 24th he tweets a poll asking if Twitter's algorithm should be open sourced March 25th he asked people if they thought the platform rig is really adhered to free speech rigorously March 26th he asked if a new platform was needed nobody wondered why is Musk picking on Twitter what's this all about well April 4th Musk disclosed in an SEC filing that he had purchased that 9.2% of Twitter stock and a hat tipped to Wed Bush analyst Dan Ives who at the time told CMBC that that purchase could lead to some sort of buyout now this was longer than the 10 days normally required to disclose the stake and he got a little hot water about that but April 5th Twitter offered Musk a seat on the board they said look you're the second largest shareholder first largest person so in exchange if you'll limit the amount of stock you will acquire to 14.9% and agree to take part in strategic decisions but not on moderation policies will give you a seat on the board and that seemed to be the thing like we don't want Musk to try to take us over that same morning Musk said he would not join the board but again we didn't know that for 5 days because it wasn't until April 10th that CEO Parag Agrawal told employees and then said publicly that Musk would not join the board at that point we thought that's it right Scott well, April 11th we keep moving forward Musk amended an SEC filing to remove the mention of the share purchase limit and add the idea of quote potential business combinations and strategic alternatives unquote in other words now he was free to buy a larger stake in Twitter and even discuss buying it publicly or otherwise April 14th let's jump to that Elon Musk offers to purchase Twitter $54.2 a share that's $54.20 a share around $43 billion was the translation at the time he called a best and final offer and said he would reconsider his existing stake in the company if it was declined so one day later April 15th, 2022 Twitter adopts a poison pill strategy that gave existing shareholders the ability to buy additional shares at a discount to dilute Musk's ownership stake and prevent this hostile takeover or if one was planned this did not mean Twitter didn't want to be acquired so much as it meant they wanted to negotiate the terms if it was required or acquired by Musk or anyone else for that matter at that time the New York Post and Bloomberg both reported that private equity firm Toma Brava was working on a possible bid for Twitter as well now let's jump another six days or so April 21st 2022 April Twitter had still not responded to Musk's offer Musk filed with the SEC that he had arranged financing to tender and offer directly to shareholders something that would spark the poison pill to go into effect would he risk the poison pill is the big question Cliffhanger ending to this episode at this point I want to remind you all you all thought oh Musk is going to try to just take over Twitter he's going to make a hostile takeover he really wants to buy Twitter all us armchair quarterbacks thought he's going to risk the poison pill and the answer was no he wouldn't in fact he didn't have to April 25th Twitter accepted Musk's offer to purchase Twitter at $54.20 a share which at that point was significantly above what it was trading at it's even much more above what it's trading at now in the agreement Musk waived due diligence and went out no like hey you didn't tell me that he agreed to a clause called a specific performance clause which gave Twitter the right to sue if he didn't follow through with the deal which by the way spoiler alert they will both sides agreed to a $1 billion breakup fee should the acquisition fail to close and Twitter would have to pay it if it decided to sell to someone else or if Twitter shareholders voted against the deal Musk would have to pay the billion in those cases neither one of those things have happened Musk would owe that amount if his financing failed or if regulatory reasons prevented him from closing so it's not as simple as Musk can just walk away from the deal and pay a billion dollars April 29th Reuters reported that Musk had secured loans to make up about half the purchase price by promising to cut costs so he was going to do half the price himself and loans for the other half Larry Ellison, Sequoia and Binance the crypto company all committed funds to invest in Musk's acquisition cutting the number the amount of the loan that he would have to get in fact Binance chief executive Changpung Zhao told the Financial Times his crypto exchange would offer Elon Musk a blank check so we're good the financing is locked Musk is getting Twitter it's just a matter of crossing the T's and doting the I's and everybody's freaking out about what's he going to do when he gets Twitter there's no is he really want it well maybe there's a couple people out there that feel real smart now but most people were like what's he going to do what's he going to do he's totally going to buy it right Scott but wait Tom there's more May 13th I would point your eyes to that big day Elon Musk tweeted that his deal to acquire Twitter was quote temporarily that spam slash fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users on quote Twitter claim of the number in its SEC SEC filing was that and he followed that post with another saying still committed to acquisition so at that time it seemed like okay maybe still going to go through with it May 16th at the event in Miami Musk or at that event at an event in Miami in Miami sorry Miami Musk buy it today said a deal at the lower price wasn't quote out of the question that's important in Miami he told people not out of the question at a lower price maybe I can get a lower price exactly if somebody needs to make a Miami Musk anyway May 17th the very next day Musk tweeted again that Twitter needed to convince him of the accuracy of its spam bot percentage the spark toro report estimated the number at 19% accounted legitimate automated accounts like those from news companies that auto post their own headlines Musk cited a figure of 20% I forgot about those guys as well anyway Twitter issued statements saying it is committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price in terms as promptly as practical on the 26th Twitter shareholders file another class action lawsuit allegedly alleging violation of California corporate laws and market manipulation now we go all the way to the 8th of June Twitter granted Elon Musk access to its fire hose of data all of it just here it is you go through the data you tell us what's wrong they had already given him their methodology which Musk found inefficient at the time June 16th Musk meets with Twitter employees to announce questions or answer questions and says nothing particularly surprising for anyone about you know whether or not he's going to buy the company whether he should buy the company side relief turns out it was just a bump in the road they give him the data he met with the employees just a little drama no big deal not unusual for Musk it's all good right but then after a month of relative quiet on July 8th Musk sent a letter to Twitter saying he would not proceed with the acquisition because of Twitter's quote materially inaccurate representations and that Twitter failed or refuse to provide relevant business information regarding spam accounts he's trying to say you can't just give me the fire hose come on you got to show me exactly what your findings say about the 5% so he waived his due diligence but he's pursuing an idea called material adverse effect which allows you to break a contract without penalty if you can prove that the business you're trying to acquire differs dramatically from what you agreed to buy Scott tries to sell me a car dealership and when I investigate I find out it's a laundromat I can say the contract's off you were selling me a car dealership so Musk is trying to argue they told me it was full of users it's full of spam however the SEC filing did not include evidence that the number was wrong so he made this filing say I'm not buying it it's a material adverse effect because there's too much spam he just asserts that he has reason to believe that the spam bots are substantially higher than Twitter claims so Twitter hired the firm Walk to Lipton Rosen and Katz who's founder Michael Lipton is credited with inventing the poison pill defense against takeovers somebody has a lot of experience in this on July 12th Twitter filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk in the Delaware court of chancery alleging that Musk violated the specific performance clause of the contract remember we mentioned that the specific performance clause that he agreed to the Twitter put in and said if you try to walk away from this without reason we can sue you they're taking advantage of that clause they're filing the lawsuit and July 13th Hindenburg research a short seller they have been advocating short selling Twitter up until this point Hindenburg researcher Hindenburg research has now taken a long position on Twitter which has the effect of raising Twitter's stock price Hindenburg said it believes Twitter's lawsuit poses quote a credible threat to Musk's empire Scott what will happen next tune in and find out Yeah you have to tune in and find out and I'll bet you'll talk about it here but I really appreciate the chance to hear and talk about this in a way that is a far as far away from whether you're a fan of Musk or a fan of Twitter or you hate both of you like one and don't like to forget about all that like what is actually happening or what has happened up to this point it's really fascinating and I still am a little bit confused about everyone's motivations like what does everyone really want here but at the end of the day I'm glad we can do it in a way that's like a part from all that drama you know I don't feel like it's likely that Musk is just trolling I don't feel like it's likely that he he didn't know what he was getting into he did but that said I'm not sure what's going on it really does when you read through that timeline it feels like he knew exactly what he was doing he bought a little bit of the company he entertained a board seat because that's a good thing to do to just be like let me entertain the idea but he rejected it immediately he wanted to buy the company from the beginning now one thing that was unexpected that happened after he decided to buy the company his Tesla stock went down which he probably did not expect the other thing that has happened is that inflation has continued to go up and the economy has tanked and the price of Twitter has gone down and he's stepping in at the end if he were to make an offer today he would make a substantially lower offer and still be accepted so I'm I'm starting to settle on the most likely thing is that he wants a better price and that if he can't get the better price he'll walk away so in other words he doesn't want to pay $54 anymore he's like it's too expensive now it would have been fine back then but it's too expensive now he's like I'm still committed to the acquisition and I'm going to talk to the employees I'll go through the trouble of talking to the employees but I really need that really need that cheaper price it's that good bad and the ugly deal they're all looking at each other waiting for who's going to draw first or back down first and I feel like we're still a little ways from that but I agree with you I think what would this ever be about other than get the price as low as you can why wouldn't you do that it makes no sense to me looking at how this all played out blow by blow you know what else makes sense to me is World Emoji Day coming this Sunday and ahead of that folks at Emojipedia have drawn up a draft version of select submissions for Emoji 15.0 these will be under consideration for approval by Unicode in September so not all of them are necessarily going to make it but under consideration are a pushing hand say no to the hand a shaking face kind of scared and stuff a moose we haven't had a moose emoji we didn't have a goose emoji we didn't have a pink heart we have purple hearts a wifi sign there's a bunch of other ones in there this is the smallest draft of candidates though ever Emoji 15 has 31 candidates compared to 1412 and 13 and 13.1 combined for 334 so this is the smallest number of emojis that has ever been recommended you can take the goose back whoever's in charge just take that back we don't like geese geese are terrible it's the Mendoza emoji that'll be my call for help Tom if that goose finally gets me I'll just send you that emoji as I struggle to get my phone if anybody doesn't know there's a goose that Scott calls Mendoza and he's a jerk he wants me dead as best I can tell so alright let's check out the mail bag real quick David weighed in on our story about BMW Korea providing things like heated seats as a subscription David says as a Tesla owner I'm familiar with software options to activate after purchase the only common subscription so far in Tesla that requires an ongoing subscription right now is premium connectivity which makes sense to me as it's relying on outside data connectivity I bought the home link option for my garage door upgrades are one-time purchases which while not inexpensive are in line with my expectations of pricing given the car and in the case of home link included some transmitter hardware subscriptions for included hardware with no connectivity requirements would alienate me as a customer if I was in the market unless there was ample verifiable evidence that the base price of the vehicle had been significantly reduced accordingly if I didn't need those features so David going like I'm fine paying Tesla for some stuff even if it's kind of software-based because it's connectivity because it's hooking me up with something outside the car but if BMW wants me to pay for heated seats that are already in the car and don't need the internet to work David's not having it I agree I had a similar conversation with a Tesla owner next door to me who he worried that the future of electrics and the future of cars in general was this kind of feature creep where they would assign subscriptions to things that are ridiculous I'm like that's what's happening man we either gotta fight this or just let it happen I don't know which and then John speaking of cars wrote in when we talked with Nika about developing for autonomous cars on Monday and we talked a lot about Apple's autonomous car John said on Friday he mentioned Apple had their self-driving car prototype in Montana for testing I see from the reports that they were driving it between Boseman and BigSky which is a road I'm intimately familiar with after decades of driving it I'd be very curious how it or any other autonomous driving system would do on that road as it's miles of winding twisting road with awful visibility and but a single stretch barely long enough to pass worse it's usually packed full of tourists and campers it's a beautiful drive but frustrating for even us meatbag drivers I have to say John I don't know if this was your intention or not but that made me raise Apple's autonomous car worthiness in my estimation I'm like wow that's right those roads up in Montana are pretty windy I've driven on some of them so if it can do that well you know yeah it doesn't have to deal with as many unexpected situations but low visibility and windy roads apparently it can do that it's like football players training in the sand as soon as they hit the turf they're just way more prepared than those guys that didn't train in the sand to me it's like that a little bit I know it's more complicated but throw more wrenches into the system and work that system out yeah maybe I'll buy your car over somebody else in either case this meatbag I'm just so appreciative that John wrote in with the on the ground report from Montana thank you sir and thank you Scott Johnson for being with us real quickly tell folks what you got going on sure all kinds of stuff happening over at frogpants.com if you're interested in any of the shows we produce or any of the artwork I make or the store that's over there all kinds of reasons to hang out over there you can do that just put up a brand new episode 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