 Coming up on D T N S why robots might increase jobs. Whatever shall we use Android apps on Windows 11 for and three things three things Sony should do to beat Microsoft in gaming. D T N S starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 26 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty Sir Lane has the day off today, but there is a longer version of this show. And if you get it called Good Day Internet, you get a nice long discussion from Scott about what he does and does not like about NFTs. Mostly what he does not like. You can get that at patreon.com slash D T N S. Oh, by the way, huge thanks to top patrons of D T N S, including Logan Larson, Mike Aitkins and Norm Fizekis. They get that right? Fizekis. Fizekis. I knew I was going to mess that one up. Norm, you're awesome. Send all your emails to me. You guys are all great. Thank you for being supporters. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The EU General Court overturned a 2009 antitrust decision against Intel. Heck, I was a buzz out loud when that decision was made. This decision involved rebates that Intel gave to PC makers to allegedly squeeze AMD out, resulting in a record 1.06 billion euro fine. The court found that the European Commission failed to show quote to the requisite legal standard that the rebates were an anti competitive risk. This ruling can still be appealed to the European Court of Justice and probably will be. Samsung officially announced its next galaxy unpacked event, and they say it will happen on February 9 to 10 a.m. Eastern time. See what actually happens this time. This invite will have a big letter S with the phrase the epic standard. So do you think it's a new Samsung Galaxy S 22 that might be announced? Well, yes, I think we all think that's probably what's going to happen. In fact, Samsung president TM Rose said Samsung will announce quote the most noteworthy s series device we've ever created note worthy a like galaxy note worthy when Twitter made it possible to use NFTs as profile picks. You may have scoffed and said that'll never happen on Reddit. I don't know why you would have said that, but I'm guessing maybe at least one of you did. So if you did, we regret to inform you you were wrong. TechCrunch reports that Reddit is testing a feature to let users set any NFT as their profile picture. The test is in its earliest stages. It has not been made available to the public. Developer Nima og found references in Reddit's web app to a test collection on OpenSea valve announced that the steam deck handheld console will go on sale Friday, February 25 to customers who have made reservations. If you're like me, your second in line on that whole deal, starting at 10 a.m. February 25 valve will send out emails in the same order that reservations were made. They actually stated that when you signed up. Once you get an email, you'll have three days to place your order shipping of those first batches of orders will begin February 28. So pretty quickly after that new batches of emails will go out in order weekly after that. So even if you're like me and you got really late, they'll eventually get to you. If you're late to the game, you can still go and do what I did months ago, which is register to reserve one basically with a $5 deposit. Those shipping is estimated for quarter two at that point. Well, Q2 though, that's not as bad as I would have thought maybe. So yeah, too bad. Yeah. Apple is number one in China when it comes to smartphones. Analysts at counterpoint estimate the Q4 smartphone sales in China declined 9% on the year. Overall 2021 sales in China down 2% year over year. In the last quarter of 2021, Apple grew its sales 32% on the year bucking the trend to become number one in China in market share with 23% first time since Q4 2015 that they have led the market. Fastest growing smart fan bro smartphone brand in China is real me with sales up 83% in Q4 and 379% on the year on all of 2021. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Microsoft. We mentioned yesterday that they had their earnings report. Cloud Office and Windows led to a strong quarterly earnings report for Microsoft Tuesday overall revenue up 20%. Microsoft even surprised people with some hardware revenue. Surface revenue rose 8%. CEO Sachin Adela's message was the time spent on Windows PCs is rising. So don't think of Windows as in decline. Think of it as a fertile ground for us to make lots of money on. Although Azure grew by 46%. So that's still the biggest of the big revenue generators. Another notable contributor, though, was LinkedIn. LinkedIn grew 37% in revenue. So there you go, you got your cloud with Azure, you got your community with LinkedIn. And remember, Sachin Adela was saying about Activision Blizzard cloud community and content. So let's talk about the content part. Overall gaming revenue was up 8% for Microsoft. Keep in mind that next quarter will become the first one with the new dedicated Microsoft gaming division in the earnings report. That's the one that Phil Spencer is now CEO of. So reporting numbers are going to move around a little bit more and reflect more of Microsoft's overall gaming business. Not every gaming studio is included in these Xbox numbers that we got this time. CEO Sachin Adela said that 20 million people had played Halo Infinite. 18 million people had played Forza Horizon 5, really trying to play up usage, which is important if you're selling a cloud gaming service subscription. And Bloomberg reports that at least the next three Call of Duty games will be on both Microsoft and Sony platforms, even if Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard in the expected fiscal next year timeframe. But of course, that's not too shocking is the earliest that Activision acquisition would close would be summer. And then the latest would be next summer. So that that seems to time out, right? Okay, after that, anything's on the table. And all of this, all of this, well, maybe not the windows stuff so much, but all most of this is bad news for Sony. Is Sony's gaming business in trouble? On the conversation dot com University of Cambridge fellow in strategy Hamza Moudassir wrote up three ways that he thinks Sony can avoid getting left behind by Microsoft. So Scott, I thought we'd kick these around. I'm going to lay them out for you. And you let us know what you think of them as we go in order. You ready? Awesome. Yep, totally ready. Alright, way number one. Sony should buy Google Stadia. No, I mean, Google has to want to sell it, obviously. But Moudassir argues that Stadia's biggest problem is a lack of content and an overly complex business model. Sony could fix that by putting the rather deep PlayStation now library on Stadia machinery. And even if they had to raise the price of 999 a little bit, it'd still be a much simpler deal than what you have with Google Stadia right now. Yeah, it's also plausible, at least in my head that we finally see some sort of white label offer here. And it doesn't necessarily have to Google Stadia has already been been doing white labels. So yeah, they've been doing it already. So why in this case, I don't know why this would be such a big deal. They don't even have to be that public about it. I mean, they kind of to be somewhat public, but they don't have to advertise on it. They could just basically say our new reworked PlayStation now and or PlayStation plus whatever they're going to call it is backended by Stadia and that technology or Google's our partner, however you want to say it, and get there just as quickly outside of having to buy them. Now I think buying them buying that division, assuming it was for sale, is probably the best long term solution because I really think Sony needs to control their own back end. They need to have or at least as much control over their back end as they can handle. And this just means they're leasing somebody else's stuff again, which is kind of what they do for their system. So, so yeah, this is this seems like the least possible solution. But it wouldn't hurt because they're kind of in a they're in a real squeeze in this particular area of their gaming anyway. So yeah, they got to do something there. I here's the here's the fly in that ointment. Microsoft Azure and Sony have a deal in the works. Yeah. And so I don't think Sony is going to go use a white label version of Stadia, which is I guess why Moodis here saying just buy it just buy it from them. You could still use Azure as its back end and then run it. You could white label it to other people if you want heaven heaven knows if Sony or Stadia is not like killing the world. They're not going to solve over, you know, on our feet and they don't certainly seem to be all that in front of it. So maybe they're ready to take a buyer and let it go. I don't know really hard to say. All right. Way number two. And again, so somebody GPEG 84 is like, isn't Sony already beating Microsoft for now? But this is like, here's what they have to do to make sure they stay ahead. Way number two, go cross platform. Instead of using game exclusivity to sell consoles, follow Microsoft's example and release games everywhere at once. Microsoft's been doing a lot of it's on Xbox and PC day and date. You could do this through PlayStation now put PlayStation now on every platform, smart TVs, phones, set up boxes, computers, heck, maybe even on the Xbox. Just get PlayStation now out there and don't try to use it as a way to sell consoles. I completely agree. This is maybe my favorite suggestion of all of these. I think they're going to end up doing this. So this is actually a prediction. I think there's that is being worked on and then it will come to fruition. But to add on top of that real quick, the other thing I think they need to do is not just what you said, but also put it on steam day and date. Microsoft's doing that also. You get, you know, Halo Infinite Day one, Forza Horizon Day one, get these games day one in the hands of gamers in all of the places that they play them, except maybe your chief rivals console, but everywhere else, basically what Microsoft's doing, you'd go a long way than then then just saying, well, hey, we're going to eventually put God of war on there, but it'll take us four years. That's been great. It's reviewing well. It's on steam now and people love it. But it took you four years to do it. Make that state stuff day and date or at least closer to day and date. That will go a long way to help shore up stuff for them. I'm looking forward. I'm looking forward to that day that it will never come. But I'm looking forward to the day that they announce Xbox Game Pass for PlayStation and PlayStation now for Xbox. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have a problem with your weird future. I don't think it's going to happen either, but maybe maybe way number three, lead the metaverse. Sony's PSF PSVR just lost its lead to the quest two last year was that it was the most successful VR headset until the quest two came along. PSVR two is coming, but it's still tethered to a console, which is kind of a non starter for a lot of people. And one of the reasons that it lost out to the quest two. So he's saying it needs to leap farther forward to stay even or even get ahead of Microsoft Meta and Apple. Yeah, I agree with this one. Microsoft has no head start in this space. They may in terms of back end. I mean, they have HoloLens, but yeah, sure. But that first HoloLens have yet to realize that. So the upcoming two who knows like there's a lot to say about the future of them. But right now they don't have any kind of like sticking the mud on this. And everyone else seems to Sony has a huge leg up in this case. I kind of thought the PlayStation VR two would end up really pushing things maybe a little bit more be an untethered device or a tethered and untethered device you could take with you for certain kinds of experiences. And I don't know exactly what I expected, but I expected more than what they showed. So they do have an opportunity here to be a bigger leader in this space. And Microsoft is late to the game on that. Yeah. All right. We've already struck off NFTs and Metaverse on your bingo card. What about virtual machines? Scott? Oh, well, let's talk about that. Microsoft will launch its public preview of Android apps on Windows 11 next month. We've been hearing about this for a little bit. Microsoft insiders first got to test the Android app Windows 11 system back in October of last year. I'll let you install a limited number of Android apps listed in the Microsoft store and served by the Amazon app store not by Google Play. It's an important distinction. This is thanks to the Windows subsystem for Android. It runs a version of the Android open source project in Hyper-V virtual machine. The subsystem can map runtime and APIs of the Android apps to the Windows graphics layer, memory buffers, input modes, and devices. That's really important. Subsystem supports AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm chips. Arm only apps can run on Intel and AMD chips through the subsystem thanks to some help from Intel. Android apps can run right beside Windows apps, and they're integrated into the alt tab, the task for you. You can pin them to your start board, all that stuff. I think that's all really important. Notifications show up in Action Center and clipboard contents can be shared with Windows apps. Yeah, that's cool. I don't know what you'd need. I don't know what you want to load in there, Tom. What what Android app you're like, Oh, man, I can't hear you. Yeah, this this is the thing, right? Because Android apps in Chrome OS got me really excited until I found that I didn't really need any of them. I I did install the Microsoft Office Android apps on Chrome OS, which is kind of fun. And then I don't think I've ever really used them. Maybe once or twice. I installed a couple of games on Chrome OS. I feel like there are going to be people in our audience and please email us feedback at daily tech news show dot com say no, this will solve a problem for me. There's this one app that I want to have access to on Windows 11, but I only have access on Android. Granted, this is a limited selection. It's not even the entire 600,000 Amazon app store apps. It's a subset of those. It was only 50 back in October. I think it's more than that now, but you're not going to get everyone. But I know there are some specific cases where this is going to be helpful. I just don't know how many of those cases there are. Well, I found, okay, so there's a good comparison that's already sort of happening over on the Apple side of things. And I just want to mention it briefly because I had a very similar experience when the M1 was launched, the M1 chips in the desktops was launched. They said, Hey, by the way, all your native iOS and iPad apps, they'll they'll just come over here and you can play them on your Mac or use them on your Mac in a very similar way that they're talking about here. We're now talking about a unified arm architecture. So go for it. Let your freak flag fly. So I did. And I tried a few things and then immediately quit doing it because I was like, I really there's nothing here that I either don't already have a desktop version of that's already syncing with my mobile version of or maybe there's a game on Apple Arcade where you're like, Well, it's cross saved. So this is a nice place to kind of mess with it here and then go check on my Star Trek guys on my phone later and it all integrates. And I suppose there's an argument for that. But for the most part, the novelty of it kind of wore off in the first day. Yeah, I think maybe this is a bigger deal for a developer than it is for an end user, right? So a developer who's got an Android app and has been wanting to port it to Windows can now push their audience of like, Hey, with that new Windows 11 subsystem, we're we're in the Amazon app store, which means we're in the Windows Store, Microsoft Store. So go check it out. You can use us now. Yeah, and there's a there's a GitHub up to kind of help developers do this. Try they're trying to make it super easy. Certainly how Apple pitched it was like, Hey, iOS developers, now you can make your apps available on Mac OS without having to do a whole lot of work. So maybe that's that's the bigger deal here. I will say the one plus here is that Microsoft the integration of the Android apps in the API of Windows itself. So you've got all the functionality you're used to on the OS level. That goes a long way, I think to making that more interesting on the Apple side. It's like, Well, this thing's locked at this tiny resolution the size of your phone up in the corner. They didn't build it to go full screen or whatever. It's a lot more hit and miss there. So maybe that will help some that integration. Folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? I know you like these topics, but we like to find out what topics you're into before we make the show. So one way to let us know is our subreddit. Submit your stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit.com. Boston Dynamics announced its first commercial customer for its stretch robots. Those are the warehouse robots that can do some carrying things around loading and unloading DHL, the shipper, the logistics company, I should say, is going to spend $15 million to bring a fleet of Boston Dynamics robots to its North American facilities over the next three years. The stretch robots will start by unloading trucks, you know, like we all do just Bob. We're just going to have you unload stretch. We're just going to have you unload the trucks to start over the course of the rollout. We might get you to help in some package handling. If everything goes well, DHL has a hard time finding staff right now. So this isn't even immediately going to displace workers because they can't hire enough people. But that does bring up the wider question of automations effect on jobs. The economist has an overview of what we know so far. And this addresses that knee jerk reaction that some of you are having right now of like, here we go, robots taking our jobs. When the lockdowns came in 2020, America's National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper mid 2020 anticipating the acceleration of job automation because of lockdowns because people being sick because people not being able to show up for work. And the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, published a paper concerned about whether such automation would cause jobs not to come back because, hey, robots don't get sick. Companies might like that and just say, you know we're going to automate these jobs. Don't bother coming back to work. The data so far shows that that has not been the case. Instead, unemployment rates have fallen in developed countries. And the economist estimates that there are a record 30 million vacancies across OECD countries, which is mostly Europe with a few other countries in South America, Australia and elsewhere. Opinions about automation therefore are evolving. A group of French and British economists believe that the direct effect of automation may be to increase employment at the firm level, not reduce it. The logic goes that automation reduces costs, which makes a firm more profitable. Instead of just hoarding those profits, as some people assumes happens, most companies invest profits in expansion because they want to grow because they want to get bigger. That expansion can then lead to increased hiring. So if the robots make you more profitable, you might expand, you might hire more people, move into new products or services. Those products or services may be labor intensive and you couldn't afford to do it before. But now that you've got the robots doing this other stuff, you can take that salary and do these more labor intensive efforts. Research by economists from Yale show that from 1978 to 2017, Japanese employment rose 2.2 percent for every one robot that was added per 1000 workers. An MIT study found a similar effect in Finland. In case you're like, yeah, but that's Japan. More studies like this are on the way from Stanford and elsewhere. Now keep in mind. Added jobs aren't always good jobs. The studies don't evaluate wages and they don't evaluate job quality. More work needs to be done at the macro scale to see if companies that automate, even if they add jobs themselves, drive competitors out, reducing jobs overall in the marketplace. Maybe that's happening. Need to see if that's the case. But if your reaction to robots in the workplace is to think they just simply took a job, it's not that simple. No, I mean, I've never gotten over the lesson. And I swear it was with you that this first got discussed. I could be wrong. And it was years and years and years ago. But the concept that the accounting world, financial services world were freaking out when Lotus 123 happened and started to get traction. They all just thought, well, this is the end of our jobs. This is the end of everything accounting. I can't believe I have a degree in accounting. I can't believe I've wasted my life sort of fear mongering that was going on back then. And it had like, approximately the reverse action. It ended up creating so many more jobs and so much more capacity for more services with these financial services companies and individual accountants that they could take on so much more. It wasn't them busily using a pencil and a ledger and trying to get it all done and in older ways. And I don't want to oversimplify that, but it just didn't end up being the problem everybody thought it was going to be. Now that's different than this. There's lots of reasons to say, well, this isn't the same as that. We're also in a different era now. Maybe this changes overall or over time. But I don't know why I just have a good feeling about it. Every time you put a robot in there to do something, it's usually because it's either not very efficient to have people do it or it's dangerous to have people do it, or you'd rather be putting that that that workforce somewhere else, but they're still there. Like I'm optimistic about it. Plus these robots are cool. They look like they could lift up heavy stuff and that's rad. Yeah, I think what you have to remember is the the idea that robots are going to take our jobs is not very helpful. In fact, you could be harming the economy if you resisted automation entirely, because I see some people resisting automation entirely that that may be bad net. What you need to focus on is, well, but what are the bad things? Are the new jobs going to be low wage? Okay, then what do we do about that? Or I mean, I think what what is very clearly to me, something to focus on is, yes, the firm may eliminate all the loading dock jobs and add a bunch of jobs in the call center. But the folks at the loading dock are now out of a job, and they may not necessarily take a job, be offered a job or want a job over in the call center. So what do you do in that transition? What do you do with the people whose jobs definitely were taken by the robot? How do you make sure that they can find another job that is suitable satisfactory gives them a good quality of life? I think I think focus on that, like how do you how do you deal with the transition? Don't try to just resist automation? At least that's where my head's at anyway. Well, speaking of logistics and moving stuff around, let's talk about Elroy Air. They have announced its pre production autonomous VTOL aircraft, the Chaperral Chaperral Chaperral. VTOL stands for vertical takeoff and landing, by the way. And Chaperral can hover like a helicopter using eight vertical fans and fly forward with four swiveling propellers. Kind of sounds like a great big drone looking thing. It is. Basically it is. It has a hybrid electrical or electric powertrain with the range of 300 miles and can carry 300 to 500 pounds, which is quite a bit. A cargo pod underneath the carriage can be autonomously hooked up and dropped right off wherever it needs to go. Last time we heard from Elroy was with a prototype in 2019. So it's been a bit. This time Elroy says it has agreements to supply 500 aircraft to commercial defense and humanitarian customers. The U.S. Air Force has funded Elroy and A Y R Logistics, who works with the food, excuse me, world food program. They've ordered a hundred of them themselves. Mesa Airlines has also expressed interest for parcel and medical deliveries. Tonomous VTOL aircraft have the potential to bring fast delivery to remote areas that may be a lot longer to get there by truck. They don't need runways. All kinds of cool uses for this tech. Very cool. Yeah, vertical takeoff and landing is expected to be one of those areas of technology to watch that somebody's going to make this take off vertically and become a useful and productive business, whether Elroy air is that one or not. Your guess is as good as mine. But here we go. Creeping closely closer and closer to actual business and unlike autonomous cars that are robo taxis in particular VTOL. I guess it's actually similar to autonomous cars in that robo taxis. That's a hard one getting people around. Cargo autonomous trucks probably going to happen first and it is already happening in tests. So I kind of look at this and say well, Elroy seems to have the right idea, which is air taxis moving people around at VTOLs. That's tough. A lot of regulations around that. A lot of safety you got to deal with. Whereas just moving cargo where there's no people on board. Probably a good deal. Although the question is, can the cost of operations be below what the areas that can benefit it will pay for it. Right. There's there the one application here that's that's obviously brought up in our conversation that I really like the most. I think is the humanitarian one, a notoriously difficult in some areas to get food and resources where it needs to be when it needs to be without a big long runway or without, you know, safety issues that can endanger lives, that sort of thing. The idea of sending one of these in there with 500 pounds of food and having it know where to land, how to land, how to avoid a problem because it's autonomous in some way or in all the ways it needs to be is very cool. Seems like a really great push forward in that area. The best usage of this is high value gear, right? Whether it's medicines or electronics. If someone's buying $5,000 worth of electronics and they need to deliver to their ranch on some hilltop without, you know, with one access road, you'll be willing to pay an extra $2,300 to get it delivered at your location on time versus waiting for a semi filled with a bunch of other stuff. And so what they would, I mean, the military is great for this is targeting high value shipments to where it needs to go because those are, it's just like Tesla with, with, you know, upper end, you know, upper upper range automobiles, you target the people that are willing to pay because they have expensive stuff that needs to be there today. Zip line is a great example of this with small amounts, right? We're talking about a couple pounds. They've made a whole business starting in Irwanda at delivering urgent medical supplies at places that would take sometimes weeks for a truck to get and they can just fly their drones over the hill or the mountain and get it there. And that's what Elway is or yeah, yeah, that's what Elway is doing here is saying like we can do that except with 500 pounds instead of just five pounds. So there yeah, there's something there. All right, let's check out the mailbag Joshua says, I really loved here in ONJJ stone again. I agree that AK isn't nearly as big of an improvement for TVs as 4k was over 1080p, but TVs aren't the only kinds of displays. My next big hobby purchase is an 8k resin printer, a printer. It uses an LCD screen to harden liquid photopolymer in a vat just above the display. The higher your displays pixel count, the more detail you'll see in your completed print. Some printers have gotten all the way up to 1152 PPI. Well, 4k to 8k isn't particularly noticeable in two dimensions. 8k makes a huge difference when you're creating something in three. It's the difference between wow, that model has a lot of detail to is that thing alive? I'm not entirely clear on the production overlap between the kinds of 8k displays used for TVs and the UV admitting ones in 3D printing, but I'm hopeful more people buying 8k TVs would make my hobby a bit cheaper as well. What a great example of that, Joshua. Thank you. Holding a torso of Batman here doesn't have his head currently, I apologize, but this was printed by our good friend, Brian. I bet he has a resin printer at home. It's not nearly this resolution, but I can tell you even at the kind of entry level resolution of resin these days, it's incredible what they're doing with resin 3D printing. So 100% with him. I think that prototyping and doing stuff for effect shops and that sort of stuff is about to take off huge in that space. And while they may not be exactly the same displaying or assembling, I think he's onto something here. I think that's really cool. Also on Tuesday, we got an email from James who said DTNS was extra informative and extra entertaining. Thanks to Owen JJ Stone. His passion was amazing and he gave Tom a reason to explain things in more detail. Most of all, he made me smile and laugh many times. Please get him back on the show again soon. Thanks, James. We forwarded this stuff to Owen, put a smile on his face. We love having Owen on. It's a blast. So yes, we will try to get him back as soon as possible. Also, thanks to our brand new bosses, Brandon Boyer and Michael Komachi, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you both. We need you. That's what we're doing the free HBO week. If you've noticed, you got extra stuff in your free Acast feed this week. It's because we're letting everybody get all the stuff that the patrons get. So just for this week, we're doing that. And if you like that, you can go. You don't have to get all of it. You can choose what of that stuff we're giving you this week. You get at patreon.com slash D T N S. Thank you, Michael and Brandon for being people who did just that. And before we get out of here, thank you, Scott Johnson. What's going on these days? Oh, always a pleasure to be here. I cannot say enough of how much I'm enjoying this new show I'm producing now called Play Retro. I do it on Mondays with my friend Brian Dunaway. And it turns out we are a couple of guys who grew up with retro video games when they weren't retro and they were new arcades and stuff at home and whatever, whatever you think of retro, we were there for it. And so reliving all of that in a modern way and learning about new ways of playing this stuff, talking about cool retro builds of arcade machines and main boxes and the retro pies and all the sort of stuff has become a bit of an obsession over the last four weeks. So if that sounds interesting to you at all, do check out our new show. It's called Play Retro. You can find it anywhere you get your podcast. Just search for play retro. Andy, go do it. Go do it. We're live Monday through Friday, 4 30 Eastern 21 38 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live Justin Robert Young on the show tomorrow and Len Peralta's in on Thursdays these days to do the illustrating. We'll all talk to you there. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Time and fun as you have enjoyed this program.