 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Dale McKayhee, Matt Zaglin, and Kelly Cook. Coming up on DTNS, we've got classical music, we've got e-bikes, we've got floppy discs, oh my, all that, and the future of drone delivery coming right up. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 9th, 2023. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Lovely Cleveland of the Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. Keeping the heart of tech, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. Well, we've got a lot to talk about, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about floppy discs, we're going to talk about e-bikes, we're going to talk about all the things, but first, we're going to start with the quick hits. Microsoft says Bing now has more than 100 million daily active users in large part because of curiosity about the new Bing chatbot. Now, you may ask, where does this compare with Google? Well, they have around one billion daily active users. About a third of people with access to the Bing chatbot use it at least once a day with an average of three chats a day. I'd like to see where those numbers are in a couple of months. Sony submitted documents to the UK competition and markets authority claiming that Microsoft might release a version of Call of Duty for the PlayStation someday where bugs and errors emerge only on the game's final level or after later updates. Sony objects to Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty. At Spotify's Stream On event Wednesday, it announced it will integrate Anchor into its Spotify for Podcasters bad dashboard to make podcast creation more efficient. It's also partnering with Patreon to let fans listen to Patreon content on Spotify. The Netherlands will increase restrictions on the export of chip technology to China in order to protect national security. Netherlands based ASML, which makes equipment used to manufacture computer chips, says it believes it will need a license to export its equipment to Chinese companies under these new rules. ASML already has not been allowed to export its most advanced machines to China since way back in 2019. Roku announced more details about Roku OS 12. Here's what you'll be able to do with the new OS. Select local news providers will show up at the top of the live TV zone. Games from teams you seem interested in will show up at the top of the sports zone. The continue watching feature will work almost immediately after you leave an app and more companies will let Roku display their shows in the continue watching section. Just adding more utility there. Roku will also redesign its mobile app and add the ability to sign into a device from the app. The company also announced that the first 11 of its Roku branded TVs with Roku right on the set are now on sale at Best Buy. Alright, those were the quick hits. Let's talk a little bit about classical music streaming music. In fact, Apple acquired Amsterdam based classical music streaming service Prime Phonic back in 2021. You may remember that we talked about it briefly on the show. Now Apple seems to be doing something with that purchase. The standalone Apple Music Classical App for iPhone will offer all Apple Music subscribers more than 5 million classical music tracks including new high quality audio releases, hundreds of playlists that are curated, thousands of exclusive albums and other features like composer bios and deep dives on key works. It's available on March 28th, although you can quote-unquote pre-order it. It's free, so don't worry, it's not going to break the bank. In the App Store, if you want to get it on day one, you'll need a device running iOS 15.4 or newer and there is no iPad specific version as of yet. You'll be able to search by composer, work, conductor or catalog and you can stream it in high quality audio up to 192 kilohertz and 24-bit high res lossless. Apple says that thousands of recordings will be made available in spatial audio as well. Apple says the service will continue to be updated with new music over time, learning it's been working with classical music artists and music institutions to offer exclusive content and recordings at launch and this will continue in the future. For now, if you just want to keep your fingers on the pulse of Apple classical music, users can track news and updates on the Twitter account at Apple classical. Apple music classical isn't separate from the overall Apple music subscription, just it lives in its own app. Android is not supported now, but Apple says it will be eventually. I guess so they are throwing it out here. I mean, Sarah, I mean, what do we think do different categories of music need their own apps? You know, I would say no for anything except classical music. I do not dislike classical music. I am a fan, particularly around the holidays, when I listen to more than I normally would. The idea that there's a standalone app for something that is pretty disparate from, I think, what Apple is doing with the rest of its Apple music app. You know, you've got trending artists, you've got curated radio shows, you've got your own playlists. You have, you know, things that you've heard it that now are going to show up later on. Classical music seems like it's in its own category. And there have been rumblings about the idea that Apple's going to do something like this for some time. So the fact that this is rolled out is not much of a surprise to me. I have seen some folks saying, are you kidding Apple? After all of this time, we knew this was coming. There's no iPad specific app. And to that I say, maybe I'm missing something here. But since it's audio first, you can run an iPhone app on an iPad. Like it's not going to not work if you have an iPad. Like, you know, that that's kind of the pushback I've seen for the most part. You either don't care about classical music in which case don't have to, you know, nothing, nothing will change. Even if you subscribe to Apple music, you know, I do 10 bucks a month. I'm down for this. Why not? But it's Apple. So you want it to be pretty and people are going to be upset if it's not specifically designed to be pretty on iPad. I'm going to push back. I do believe that this is something that they should do for other genres. And I would specifically look at the rap and hip hop genre. There are a lot of things that don't necessarily mesh with the taxonomy of rock and pop, maybe more pop in terms of artists collabing on different songs. If you want to listen to specific, you know, I've long wanted, I mean, I think there's a programmatic solution to let's say every diss track that came back and forth from each other. I would love that. And I think that those are the kind of things that you could do and put forward. Not to say that you can't do it on Spotify or Apple music right now, but if the goal is to increase listening time, the goal is to make sure that for every reason I never let my subscription lapse. Then give me new ways that I can dive into my favorite kinds of music in a app designed for it. I think that it's a smart thing to do. Yeah. And I would also say like, I mean, like I can even see this for a lot of electronic music where a lot of those are like, like much longer, more continuous tracks where you don't want these kind of interruptions. And that's where classical does have a very, I feel like unique set, but again, just to your point, could apply to others where you're more interested in composer, you're more interested in individual performers necessarily, or just certain recordings where, you know, a pianist or something has recorded this particular suite of music any number of times and you're looking for one very specific one. And then another thing, like when you're listening to opera where you're wanting to take in a larger body of work, perhaps, and even having just a little dip in the audio where there's like that separation in the track. I know some services have that more noticeable than others. Having something that's more catered to that makes a big difference. And in terms of like the classical music streaming landscape, I was kind of looking into this. And Idagio, I think is the only other like dedicated classical music. If there's others, please let us know at feedback. But it offers something very comparable about Apple's offering 16-bit flack, lossless recordings, local downloads and stuff like that as well. But I think it's kind of, I mean, obviously they took a player out of the market when they acquired Prime Phonic and they took that service down, right? So, you know, you just had the Apple music service up until now. I think it's, it definitely serves that community. I don't know if that makes a huge difference to Apple's bottom line services, but I can definitely see the utility for it. Go ahead, Justin. Oh, yeah, go ahead. Okay, fine. I do feel like Apple is going to get a lot of great intel from this app. If you are a classical music fan, as far as, you know, the quality of sound, the fact that you can play albums from to back, you can do both of those things in Apple music itself. But, you know, if you know that you have an audience that's a little bit more dedicated to, oh, I don't know, the, you know, the sanctity of, you know, the classical music experience, then you can kind of give them this, see what sticks and then figure out, okay, well, what actually makes the most sense for us to build into a next version of Apple music with all the other genres? As you said, Justin, it's like hip hop, R&B, rock, you know, whatever it is. I think that they are banking on a type of user that's going to help Apple decide, here are the people that we can sell the really high-end speakers to, you know, in a year or two. Yeah, I also think that I would like to applaud Apple by saying, hey, you bought a service and you just made an Apple version of a standalone service. I would have loved to have seen that with Dark Sky. Yeah, yeah. Instead of folding it into a larger thing. But I do agree it's not about whether or not you can do these things in Apple music or any other gigantic app with every single song. It's whether or not it's easy. It's whether or not it's fun. It's whether or not it's something that you want to interact with. Well, Alphabet's drone delivery company Wing announced a new system where drones could take pickup delivery assignments without having to return to a home base. Right now, a drone leaves from a charging pad at a base, goes to an auto loader station at retail outlets to pick up deliveries automatically, then deliver them to a destination after which it kind of has to go back to that home base. But under the Wing delivery network, a drone can automatically delegate tasks to its fleet anywhere in the process. If it has enough charge, it can move on to the next pickup, much like a ride-hailing system where the company also plans to add more nodes where drones can land to recharge in between trips. Wing says that they want to do quote-unquote millions of deliveries for millions of people cheaper than ground deliveries by 2024. So question to the panel, does this get them there? I think it gets them closer. We talk and we've started being a little snarky as I've laid on the show the drone delivery system. You hear a lot about strides being made, but not a lot of people can say, oh yeah, I had a drone delivery delivered by prescription drugs or some not that heavy retail items to my backyard, because almost nobody is able to do that. Now, that is not necessarily because of the drones need to recharge at their home base station, but if you kind of think of, all right, let's say that we figure out a lot of these hurdles in five years from now, so fast forward five years. You've got a lot of drones going through the sky. The drone that can go to Rich's house, Sarah's house, Justin's house, then back to home base makes way more sense than the drone that has to go Rich's house home base, Sarah's house home. There is just, you want less drones in flight at that point, kind of not unlike the EV conversation that we're having all the time. It's like, you have more charging stations than you can do things more efficiently. Well, as we've seen with self-driving cars where 2020 was the goalpost for the longest time where we're going to hit level whatever and then it just went away. I don't know how much we should stop. I don't think we should stop this 2024 date because that could very easily slip. But I do think it's a big deal that they're talking more about this infrastructure layer versus a, hey, we have a drone that can lift two more pounds and it can go two more miles. We've seen some other drone delivery companies, I'm thinking specifically of Amazon kind of focusing on the drone hardware and wing here is very much saying like, we're trying to figure out how we can get it back to a recharging base and not have to go that extra mile and a half. We can go to the CVS at the corner after it does the delivery to you and then it operates almost like a ride hailing network from there. That's a very interesting component that the other part of it is they were talking about also with these auto loader stations of taking advantage of retailers that already have like parking spaces dedicated for customer pickup orders and saying, we already have these spaces that are empty most of the time. We can just stick an auto loader kind of in the front of the one of those and we solve a lot of that infrastructure problem as well to kind of shorten all of the distances that they can to eke out as much for each charge that that drone has to have to get to a certain point to get the most deliveries and the most mileage out of it. Because again, I think if they wanted to throw unlimited money into it, that's a different year for Alphabet, they could do millions of deliveries maybe but that cheaper than ground is the key part to it. Well, since we're talking about deliveries, what about delivering your person on a bike? And that bike is an e-bike. The bike maker specialized which any hardcore enthusiast knows that brand, but if you don't, they've been making e-bikes for a while under their turbo brand. These integrate technology in many components but come at a price premium with many models in the mid to high four figure zone. So you have to really want this bike. Well, the company recently revived its early 90s globe sub brand to launch a new line of e-bikes including the haul ST cargo e-bike. You might say, why is it so special? Well, this brings over some of the interesting technology featured in its turbo line, including over the air updates to add functionality. Feature wise, kind of what you expect from a long tail e-bike with plenty of room for accessories to haul cargo, you know, basically kind of looks like buckets on the side of the bike. And people, you know, you can haul more than one person too for this price because it starts at $2,700. But the cargo and utility e-bike space has become somewhat crowded in recent weeks, right, Rich? Yeah, and across some really interesting price points over the last month, we've seen these cheaper cargo e-bikes from newer brands. They're well known in the e-bike space like Electric and Aventon, but these are definitely, you know, more on the startup side. These significantly undercut the haul ST on price. The electric expedition is almost half the price starting at $1,399. And this is not like a stripped down e-bike. It's pretty well featured for that price. Neither of these are as smart as the haul ST in terms of, you know, having that over the air software update functionality, but they do offer similar load capacities about as powerful motors in terms of if they can carry two people, that kind of stuff. The other part is that the direct-to-consumer e-bike giant Radpower recently launched its RadRunner 3 Plus utility bike for $2,299. With it, the company launched a line of quick-attached trailers to provide more hauling capacity when you need it. This isn't proper, I guess, you know, cargo e-bike, but if you add that trailer, it certainly adds a lot of capacity to it. But I guess the question is obviously a lot of bike makers are saying, hey, a semi-affordable non-bike lifestyle cargo e-bike, they seem to think there's a market. What does a non-cargo bike lifestyle mean? I'm sorry? If you're saying it's not a non-cargo bike lifestyle for people who might actually buy these bikes. I'm sorry, I'm saying a bike enthusiast. If you are a full-time, like I only ride a bike, you very well may invest several thousands of dollars into it because that is your transportation. Take that very seriously. My question is I'm wondering if people that are, you know, mostly driving their cars, but can this category be used as kind of a second-car supplement? I think that for some people it's going to have to in terms of this market. Right now we are moving into a place where, features-wise, you have everything that you would kind of want for it to be something that's worth that price. I don't think that it's unfair to offer these at over 2,000 for what you get. It is essentially something like an underpowered motorcycle when you really think about it. It is perfect for urban living if you don't have a car, but even more so, you know, in a place like Austin, when, you know, we're a little bit out into the burbs of South Austin, but we can get downtown very quickly. I could get there even faster if I had a electric bike. The question is, with this field maturing, where does it go? Does it eat into the idea of people that have never bought a powered bike before? Because that's probably not going to be the $2,500 class. This seems to be more on the side of underpowered motorcycle, or in the case of the stuff that they're pushing here, use this as a utility for your business. This is a platform for which you can move things very easily. Yeah, I, you know, as much as I have friends who have been invested, not monetarily, but just invested in the idea of e-bikes, that depends very largely on where they live and what they're doing. This seems to me like it would be a great second vehicle for me. I have one car, I need that car currently to do anything because I live in the woods, but certain things could be achieved by biking. But there's some hills around here, so the e-bike thing is helpful for me. So I'm not, you know, totally going for it too much when I'm at the helm. But I don't know who is not interested already in something like this because it's sort of exercise, like you said, Justin, sort of the idea of a motorcycle, but less so motorcycle-ish. Yeah, 28 miles an hour on a Class 3. 100%. Yeah, like if I want to go to the grocery store, get some stuff, like I would rather have an e-bike than my car in many situations, particularly because I don't have to, you know, give it gas. But yeah, I think where you live and what you do and what your habits are matters so much for stuff like this. So you get these great products and you go, who wouldn't want this? I mean, I want to do, but am I going to use it? The other thing to keep an eye on in this space is there is starting to also kind of Justin another split that we're seeing in this market is these things as tech products almost and these things as bike with electric assist built in where there is a bike culture of I can upgrade all of these parts and I can maintain all of these parts myself where I go to my local bike shop and they can pretty much handle everything. This haul ST uses like proprietary tire size. Rad power is also very infamous for using tires you have to go through them or one of their suppliers for doing so. Having more integrated electronics, you know, where there's going to be a software like at some point this will not receive a software update, right? There's other companies that are doing this too. I don't want to just pick on the haul ST here. VanMoof is another company that's kind of famous for being a high tech kind of it's like the apple of e-bikes in a lot of ways like they like to market themselves as. So seeing I'm also curious to see if it's people want these as these more sealed off solutions that hey, they I can update my app and I can use my find my integration and all this stuff or is it more of an extension of a bike with just an electric assist? I think it's another interesting thing to keep an eye on. Well, if you want us to talk about anything on the show, may it be e-bikes or anything else that you might want us to talk about on a future show. Or if you have thoughts about anything we've talked about on a previous show, our subreddit is a great way to make your voice known. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Remember back in March 2011, we were all over a decade younger. I don't remember anything notable that happened there. But anyway, Sony, I do remember one thing. They stopped making the venerable floppy disk at that month, seemingly spelling doom for everyone's favorite way. Just our 1.44 megabytes of data. But that doesn't mean people stop using them just because they stopped making them. Wired's Jacopo Prisco recently profiled some of the people and industries still using the format. And some of the use cases are pretty surprising. Boeing 747-200s, old Airbus A320s, and some business jets still use them to do things like update flight management systems. They're also commonly used in older design tools for like textiles to load layouts. That's just the format you need to use. What stands out when talking to users of these older machines is that the owners report the functionality of using a floppy to be fine. It's only the supply of disks that's becoming an issue. Tom Persky of floppydisk.com reports that he sells 1,000 disks a day with 3.5-inch disks costing $1 a piece. With a fixed supply, you'd think that the price on existing disks would continue to increase, but it seems price pressure incentivizes existing users to eventually look at floppy to USB emulators. Although these cost hundreds of dollars and often need to be custom-made for different machines. Yeah, so Persky already said that the old 8-inch floppy disk is effectively a dead format. We've seen seemingly dead audio formats make resurgence, however. But can any nostalgia possibly save the 3.5-inch floppy? I, for one, hope that we can. I don't even have a good re... Like, I don't even... There is not one computer, and there are quite a few in my house of horrors down here in Studio Redwood. Not one that can take advantage of the floppy, but I love the idea of this the same way I love the idea of vinyl. And I don't think it's like a, you know, it's a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison. But same thing, people saying, this is great storage. Sure, you can't put a ton of stuff on a single floppy, but it works. Why not? Absolutely. I think that nostalgia tech is real. In general, this is not necessarily tech, but anytime that people reach a certain age and have a certain amount of money, they look back into their past and they think about the things that they couldn't buy or they remember fondly and they want to buy them again. It just happens all the time. Now, when it comes to storage capacity, I do think that there is something attractive physically to the idea of that format of a floppy disk. It's, you know, rigid. It feels good in your hand. The question is the utility for it. And beyond having something that is an exciting form factor, maybe privacy, you could see a world in which these floppy disks have a second life, but you never know. I wouldn't have thought that vinyl records would have stayed around and continued to be something popular. But beyond nostalgia tech, I don't see a gigantic use for them, but who knows how big the nostalgia tech industry can be? What I think is, I don't know, I guess the thing that was most interesting to me about the story is the fact that with a seemingly finite supply, the price hasn't gone up exponentially. You know, you'd think, all right, well, we're talking about 2011, people's, you know, or companies rather stop providing these. They're still out and about. People are still buying them. But, you know, vinyl records, you know, I think vinyl is sort of a different conversation because now it's become back and vogue to the point where prices have come down a bit. But it was for a while like, ooh, this is a niche birthday present for somebody type thing. And, you know, the floppy disk kind of being the same thing, like, I know people who would be like, you want to give me 10 floppy disks? I will love you forever, Sarah. The only difference between a floppy disk and a record is that the experience of listening to an album has materially kind of changed, whereas this is just another way to access a file. Sure. Or an album of digital music in a very, very low rate on the floppy disk. Might eat and chill a bit per second tracks. These are amazing. Oh, good stuff. Well, if you're a floppy disk enthusiast or you say, ah, should die like other tech, do let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Speaking of our mailbag, Rich, what have we gotten there today? Well, we were talking about the utility of using voice assistance for smart lighting on Monday Show and a non-Robert Young Justin wrote in to say it may be true that turning on a light switch manually can be easier for some, but in those living rooms with no overhead light and poorly thought out light switch placement. Justin, I feel you on this one, telling the voice assistant to turn on and off both floor lamps and other assorted table lamps using a single routine is a lifesaver. That is co-signed by the Robert Young Justin as well. Oh, Sam, we are in accord on this one. I cannot tell you, yes, I'm capable of turning my lights on and off manually. But we've got, I've got all sorts of, you know, depending on the day, when I say good morning, it does something, the lights, you know, we've got different colors. It's a cray-cray situation. I know this, but the idea that I would just be like, oh, I'm going around the room, which is a small room, by the way, I live in a studio apartment, to manually turn on everything on and off. No, thank you. The good night command to me is the killer app for that because it's like, once you've gotten in bed, you realize you left the downstairs, you're just like, turn it off. Turn off everything. Good night. Shut her down. Did that last night and I was like, oh, yes. Good night. Good night, Moon. We also got an email from Garrett. Garrett works in bioscience and wanted to share some thoughts on automation increasing mundane work for lab technicians, which we talked about on Wednesday show yesterday. Garrett says, well, it could be true that these tools could increase the workload before the technicians involved. At the same time, it can greatly increase the output of experiments or other results. In your example, the lab would now be able to conduct 10x more experiments than before. Well, that would increase the amount of work needed to train and clean, et cetera. The bottom line is that they're able to conduct many more experience than before. Before that, meaning hiring 10x more lab techs. Now they can implement automation, but they're a bunch smaller percentage to perform the added work that the automation created and the output is much greater in relation to the work added. So, yeah, Garrett, if I could kind of summarize that. Garrett saying, well, it does create more work, but it does create more research output, which is the whole idea of research. So if you're working in that field, you say, well, all right, more work still means more output. Yeah, really good perspective from the industry. So thank you, Garrett. And also, thank you, Justin, Robert Young, bringing the fire as always, much appreciated. Where can people find your stuff online if they want to check out one of the many pots you have fingers in? You can listen to the Where Now Wrong podcast featuring myself, Andrew Heaton and Jen Briney. That is available on all podcast platforms everywhere that you want to look. Well, we thank you for being with us, Jerry, as always. We also want to thank our brand new boss. We have a brand new boss named Adam. Adam, you just started backing us on Patreon. We see you, we hear you, and we thank you. Thank you, Adam. Speaking of patrons, did you want to thank Adam too, Rich? I did. Adam, you mean so much to me. Thank you. Adam, you are our best friend. Adam, I love you. Adam, please come over for Sunday dinner. This is not a request. It's a... you must. If you are a patron, do come over for Sunday dinner. But before that, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We're talking about global shutter cameras. If you're saying, what are those? Well, they help prevent distortion on fast-moving or rotating objects. And Raspberry Pi is going to come into this story. Remember, you can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Remember, we'll be back tomorrow talking about hardware key protocols with Shannon Morris and illustrated by Len Peralta. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.