 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Hector Bones, Tim Ashman, and Johnny Hernandez. Coming up on DTNS, Patrick Norton tells tales from the hunt for the Raspberry Pi with some tips on how to find one. Plus, while why Qualcomm's switch away from Samsung chips will make for better gaming phones, and now may be the time for a projector TV if you're flushed with cash. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 20th, 2022 in Los Angeles. And from Studio Redbird, I'm Sarah Lane. Patrick from... I'm in St. Louis and I just accidentally erased something on the script, but it's fixed now, and I was really distracted for a moment. Hi, everyone. Thank you for fixing it. I appreciate that. Illustrating the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. All right, let's get right into the tech news with some things you should know. The government of Canada announced it will prohibit the inclusion of Huawei and ZTE products and services in Canada's telecommunications systems, citing national security concerns. 5G equipment from the companies already in use must be removed as of June 28th, 2024, with 4G equipment removed by the end of 2027. Well, that's my birthday. CNET reports that scientists at the University of Washington have developed flat, circular sensors that can be dropped from drones to float and gather environmental data. They're like a little less than the size of a quarter, you know, or a washer. Small solar panels and a small capacitor power the electronics, which could gather data like temperature, humidity, pressure. They could also be used with accelerometers or magnetometers. Information is transmitted by a backscatter chip, and each sensor sits in the middle of that plastic disk that is laser cut by design so that it can be carried along by a breeze and land with the solar panels face up like a badminton thing or a cat. A typical quadcopter could carry about a thousand of these, so they're pretty small and light. You can check out the CNET video for more details on other projects that the UW team is working on as well. In video's game streaming service, GeForce now released a touchscreen optimized version of Fortnite after releasing a closed beta of the game back in January. Apple removed Fortnite from the iOS app store in August of 2020, so this opens the door for iOS users to play the game using mobile devices again. If they never deleted their original. On June 1st, Google begins enforcing its rule that apps using the Play Store billing system for in-app payments have to use the Google Play Store system for in-app payments. Bandcamp uses its own in-app payment system for selling music on behalf of artists that use the platform. And then you must recall that Epic bought Bandcamp in March, which is significant because Epic is suing Google over the requirement to use Google Play's in-app payment system. So this is actually good news for Bandcamp because Google and Epic reached an agreement where Bandcamp will put 10% of its in-app payment revenue in escrow until Epic's court case with Google is settled. And in the meantime, Bandcamp can keep using its own system. Bandcamp has also said it will not reduce the cut it pays to artists. That 10% will come out of its side of everything. So artists keep getting money the same way they have. The Japanese gaming side Famitsu reports that for the week of May 9th through the 15th, Xbox Series S console sales beat out PlayStation 5 sales. The last time Xbox beat PlayStation in the Japanese market was during the launch week of the Xbox One and that was September of 2014. The sales swing is likely due to low supplies of PS5 units. Yeah, thank you. I do. Yeah, you convinced me. Like any good party, let's start with chips. Qualcomm has announcements for mixed reality and gaming phones. Let's start with the phones. Yeah, so Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. The Plus is its annual mid-generation performance refresh. So not a super surprise there. But this one appears to be a little bit different. Yeah, it is. And Antec notes this is more than just the faster speed. You'd usually get it at the mid-gen update. Qualcomm actually switched from Samsung's line to TSMC's line. So it's actually a new chip die. That gave the company the opportunity to tweak power efficiency and performance for the CPU and the GPU. Qualcomm says you'll get 10% faster CPU that uses 15% less power with quote-unquote practical usage patterns. It also can sustain its clock speed longer, which is good for gaming. The versions without the Plus in the name are sticking around too, so you probably still see those in phones. This Plus Gen will probably go into specialty phones, probably video gaming phones. Okay, so let's say we expect to see the 8 Plus showing up in gaming phones. Asus ROG and Black Shark among quite a few, but a dozen or more phone makers signed up to cell phones with it starting in Q3. Yeah, I think the significant thing here is not the mid-range announcement would just be almost something we do in the quick hits at the top normally. But the fact that there's some scuttled butt out there that maybe Samsung's line isn't as good right now as TSMC's, which might have caused the switch. But whatever reason Qualcomm switched, Patrick, it sounds like they had an opportunity to do a little more redesign than they might normally. You so rarely get to do a do-over on a chip, maybe mid-span. And in this case, well, they did their mid-span do-over, but they just got to optimize a few things. I wish they had more details or wish there was more information floating around about Samsung's line or what may or may not be problematic. Is it yield? Is it the performance? Is it who knows? But I thought it was kind of fascinating that they actually jumped to another contract fab like this. That kind of is mind-blowing to me. Yeah, it's pretty significant. And we heard earlier about Samsung raising its chip prices. I don't know if cost plays a part in this or not, but it's good for TSMC, I guess. TSMC had raised their prices roughly 20% last year and they're planning on doing another raise next year. So I don't think cost is the big issue here. Probably not then. Yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, you're going to have to wait and see these in some video game phones that if you want to try it out, otherwise you're probably going to keep seeing the non-plus version in your normal phones until we get what, Gen 2? Is that the next Snapdragon or is it Snapdragon 9? I'm always confused by the new. We wait with bated breath. All right, over to augmented reality. Qualcomm also updated its AR smart viewer reference design running on the new Snapdragon XR2 platform, Gen 1. Previous one of this was XR1. It uses Wi-Fi 6 and 6e along with Bluetooth instead of a USB-C cable. So you get the wireless. Headset still connects to a phone or a computer for the software with the headset handling your full head and hand tracking. If your device that you're connecting to has Qualcomm's FastConnect 6900 chip for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, they say the latency will be as low as three milliseconds. So, okay. So if the displays are 1920 by 1080, 90 Hertz micro-LEDs rather, but the field of view is reduced from 45 to 40 degrees, that doesn't sound like it's going in the right direction. Why did they do that? I think the short answer is wait. The field of view is smaller, but so are the glasses. The frames dropped from 25 millimeters to 15.6 millimeters deep. So they're not quite as bulbous. They weigh 115 grams. By comparison, the Quest 2 weighs 503 grams. Oh, yeah. So this is very light. Yeah. However, none of this is good news for the battery life, is it? Yeah, very much not. As somebody who is a VR enthusiast and I need more than 30 minutes of battery life on a single charge. The fact that this wireless solution means the battery life is about 30 minutes for VR experiences. I don't know. I mean, sure, sometimes that's going to work, but many, many, many times not going to work. You can, of course, attach a battery, you know, you know, include a cable, but that's obviously defeating the purpose of being wireless and being light and not having things like that. Manufacturers could increase the battery size, but obviously that's going to make it heavier. So this whole idea of like lightest ever 30 minutes. I don't know. It's not great. Although we should keep in mind this is not an enterprise level, replace your desktop monitor design like some of the others we're seeing. This is for entertainment and there will be companies making products out of this, right? Yeah. This is reference design, right? Yeah, yeah. This is the XR2 reference design. Sarah, I think people did make products out of the XR1, didn't they? Indeed, they did. And yeah, I mean, listen, the whole idea of every time I put on my Oculus Quest 2, which actually weirdly is lighter than my Quest 1, but doesn't fit my head as well. But that's neither here nor there. Every time I'm like, yeah, this is weird and dorky and wouldn't it be nice, you know, if they were just like contact lenses that I put in my eye at some point, you know, we'll get there, right? Someday. Someday. Someday. We're not there yet. So I think, yeah, we're getting to the point of like comfort versus usability. And right now it sounds like comfort takes away from usability because you don't have the battery life. Where are you going to put it? On your hip holster with your cable that tethers over your ear. And you don't want, you don't want that. I mean, some people are like, oh, that's fine. But most people don't want that. Listen, if you're someone who used the Unreal or Lenovo versions of XR1 in the past, write us back at DailyTechNewsShow.com. We want to know why. Qualcomm says four manufacturers developing products with this new design, but no word on who, what or when. These are very much trial devices still, even with this new reference design, because 30 minutes battery life, that's, that's, I want to play around with this, not something I'll all, you know, get serious about. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, moving on to projectors. And Patrick, we know you know a lot about projectors. So let's talk about the new LG ultra short through projectors. Before we get to that though, explain to everybody out there who's like, what's a throw projector? You throw it. What's happening? So yeah, I'm now about to make cornhole jokes and picnic jokes. So traditional home theater projectors are like the projectors movie theaters. They're usually mounted on the ceiling, kind of above and behind the seats. Mine, I think is like 10 or 12 feet from my screen. And my couch is about three feet in front of the projector. Ultra short throw projectors use some crazy wide angle lenses. I mean, concave, a spherical mirrors, which are exciting. And they can put the projector eight inches or a foot from the screen. Typically these days. So it makes it really easy to install instead of having to put an outlet or run a, you know, a cable across your ceiling, you drop it on a console or a cabinet just below the screen and plug it in. In some designs, they're still ultra short throw, but you can mount them on the ceiling. But truly, I think most folks are trying to avoid putting electrical outlets in or mounts on their ceilings. And some people just find ceiling mounted projectors to be really irritating. Why is that thing on the ceiling with the movies? Well, yeah, it's just something you got to look at. So, okay. So for example, the LG Cinebeam projectors can throw 100 inch picture from 9.8 centimeters away. That's less than four inches. Can also do 120 inches from 8.3 centimeters away, which is just a touch over seven inches. And a new model, the HUN 915 QE can do all of that at 3700 ANSI lumens, ANSI stands for the American standards, National Standards Institute of Lumens. So, Patrick, is that good and why? Well, it's really good. So, okay. So first up, 100 inch screen from four inches is really impressive. That's that new HUN 915 QE. Back in February, LG released their previous flagship, ultra short throw projector, the HUN 715 QW, which would sit eight and a half inches away to do 100 inch screens. They've halved the distance. This is amazing. ANSI lumens, and when they say ANSI lumens, it means they're measured in a specific way, which means it's harder to lie about the amount of lumens coming out of your projector, which is important when you're projector shopping. So more ANSI lumens means you can use the projector in rooms with more ambient light and you don't have to like, you don't have to make everything, you know, you don't have to live in a dark cave to use the projector. It also means, you know, more lumens delivers better HDR performance. If you can hit higher lumen output levels from your projector. So being that this is an LG product, the new Cinebeam is running WebOS, which has streaming apps, pretty good selection of them. Can also do AirPlay 2, has two HDMI arc ports, two USB 2.0 jacks, and integrated 40 watt 2.2 channel speaker as well. And it has a 4K HDR video from three channel laser. This sounds like pretty good specs, right? It's interesting. It's literally their new flagship. It's twice as expensive as that 715, that 715QW I mentioned. So they say adjust brightness automatically based on how bright your room is. Typically, home for theater projector reviewers say to leave that off if you want the best, most accurate picture. The release doesn't mention HDR10+, but it says projector does dynamic tone mapping in HDR on a frame by frame basis, which sounds like HDR10+, but may not be. We'll see when it actually ships. They're also doing adaptive contrast. So lasers, they use an iris in a traditional projector with a bulb and the iris opens and closes to help make blacks look blacker in different scenes. So in this case, they have something that I guess dials the lasers down a bit to make them, to be again, the same thing, to make your blacks look blacker to make HDR look more HDR-y, I guess, to use highly scientific video terms. You know, I know I'm one of those people. You know, there are probably some people out there being like, how close could it actually be to the wall though and project a nice image? This is, we're all used to kind of what you were talking about before. That idea of like the cinema, it got to be in the back of the room, top of the room, you know, you need some, you can't, you can't, you can't just like shove this into your console that's on the same wall as the projected screen would be, but this actually sounds like you can. That's literally what ultra short throw projectors are for. And it's literally, because they know more people, you know, 100 inch television, 80 inch televisions are expensive, 85 inch televisions are expensive, 100 inch televisions are prohibitively expensive, but projectors, 100 inch projectors are pretty affordable by comparison. But people are like, I don't want to mount it on the ceiling. I don't have an electrical outlet in my ceiling. I don't want to run any HDMI cable across my ceiling. So ultra short throw projectors allow you to do these massive screens and pardon my technical language, shove the projector really close to the wall. And I also should point out you definitely want with ultra short throw projectors, you want an ultra short throw projector screen, because they're designed to reject a lot of the ambient light, especially if you have any kind of overhead lighting in the room. And that helps make it look better. You know, I think my, you know, figure $600 to $1,000, probably closer to $1,000 if you're doing a 128th screen. And this projector is not cheap to begin with. LG didn't announce a price, but the Verge notes that B&H is showing a pre-order of around $6,000. Coming by the end of June to North America. Yeah, so for anybody who's like, this sounds great. Well, there's trade-offs, right? Because a traditional projector using a bulb, you get, you know, four or 5,000 hours out of a bulb, then you buy a new bulb and a lot of bulbs cost $300 plus. So a laser, you get 20,000 hours of life out of the laser, which is the equivalent of buying a projector plus a bunch of bulbs. So there's trade-offs here. The projectors, you know, there's a, there's some incredible projectors under $1,000. There are some incredible projectors. You can, you can buy a house or buy a projector, you know, depending on where you're living in the country and how much money you have. But, you know, a typical flagship projector, it's not unusual to see those, you know, from Epson or a JVC or Sony or LG in that $4,000 to $6,000 range. That said, there's some fantastic projectors from $1,000 to $3,000. Yeah. Well, folks, if you've got a question about anything we talk about on the show, you might say, well, what's your email address? I don't know it off the top of my head. Here it is. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Now you know it. Raspberry Pi is good for modders, good for hackers, good for people who like making things, but they can be a bit hard to find these days. And Patrick Norton has been on a quest to figure out where to find them. So Patrick, how can we find the Pi? Okay. So I've been quietly weeping because I was so frustrated not being able to find Raspberry Pi 4s or 3s for sale anywhere. So there's official vendors. You go to raspberrypi.com, you look at the Pi you want to buy, and they have, you know, buy now buttons there. And those link to all of the legit vendors for Raspberry Pis in the country you live in. So, and so I couldn't find anything for months. Starting back in October, November of last year. I think the last Raspberry Pi 4s offer sale was probably October of last year. And I'm like, I'm looking and I'm looking and I can never find them. And around April 4th, raspberrypi.com released their production and supply chain update blog post. And they flat out said, look, they feel the right thing to do is to prioritize commercial and industrial customers over individuals because they've been developing these compute modules. They've been developing relationships with people that are building businesses and making their living selling these and they want to keep them in business. And I was like nuts. I'm never going to find one. And then a few days after that, I found out about rpilocator.com. So if you're trying to find a Raspberry Pi or a Pi compute module or a zero whatever W2, this website is incredible at DP hacks, who I'm sure has a name in the real world, but I can't find it. He's also known as at maker by mistake. He couldn't find a Pi and he built a website that tracks all the legit Pi vendors and posts whenever one of them gets a shipment of raspberry pies all over the world. So given that I've been searching for Raspberry Pi 4 for probably more than six months at this point, I was like, this is incredible. And I've missed two U.S. vendors that have gotten pies. So I think I just need to stay up 24 seven, 365 watching this. Or you go to, you know, at our locator on Twitter. Yeah, it sounds doesn't obsession is always healthy in my family. So, you know, I haven't found one, but at least a few steps closer. It also validates the raspberry Pi.com folks or the Raspberry Pi manufacturers because they're saying we're shipping them constantly all over the world. And you're like, really? Cause I've been, I've been, I've been clicking a lot of links a lot of days now, but you can see the list of all the places they've showed up and the price they're selling them for. So, uh, and they're, they're shipping them all around the world. So it turns out the world's a big place. So you can, it is a big place. And you can ship them around the world and still not hit, you know, my local location very often. Yeah. No, it's, it's, uh, it is what it is, right? Um, you know, the, the, one of the things they talked about is that the Raspberry Pi, uh, crew are their way scaling up, uh, on some product lines to make availability better. And for what it's worth, if you can't find a Raspberry Pi, uh, Pi 400, the Pi built into a keyboard have been fairly consistently, you know, for sale somewhere in the United States, uh, or around the world. I mostly know the United States, uh, pretty consistently. Um, you know, it's not the same as a Raspberry Pi board. But if you want to do the computing type stuff or the programming type stuff, those are a good option. And, uh, Pico's Raspberry Pi Pico's are pretty easy to find. So I love this. Like right now, right at the second, not when you listen to this later, but right now you can get a Raspberry Pi in five places in the world. The UK, the US, uh, it looks like China. Maybe I don't know what CH is, uh, Belgium and Portugal. Check with Slovakia. Oh, is that Czechoslovakia, the CH? Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Maybe you can also, I mean, are they for sale on eBay? Are they for sale on Amazon? Yes. But you're often paying twice, three times. You know, you're paying incredibly inflated prices. Dot CH is Switzerland. Thank you, beatmaster. Oh, that's why it's in German. That makes sense. Yep. Dot CH, gotta love it. So everybody who listens to the show knows what a Raspberry Pi is, likely has one or is Tinker around with one. Patrick, in your quest to find a Raspberry Pi 4, what do you want to do with it? I have a new audio project that I'm working on. And I also want a second one to play around with a robot device that one of my kids wants to play around with. Very cool. Yeah. Good luck. Or should I say, good hunting. Yeah, I like the hunting teleho. Good night and good luck. Uh, well, moving on to space, you know how I love space. NASA reports that Voyager 1, if you're not familiar with Voyager 1, it's been around for quite some time. It's one of two space probes that NASA launched back in 1977 to study Jupiter, Saturn, their respective moons, get intel, send it back to Earth, is now sending confusing data back to Earth. Apparently the spacecraft's control system regularly sends to let the tree data back to NASA, showing its location and what's going on. But Voyager 1's engineering team says, I don't know, we've been getting jumbled and full on inaccurate data, which is puzzling because its signal still seems to be strong and the apparent glitch hasn't triggered its safe mode, which is something that would be triggered if there was a real problem, at least in the eyes of Voyager 1. Now Voyager 2, that's the other Voyager, the sister probe, appears to be doing just fine. Both probes are now farther away from Earth than Pluto. Putting that into perspective, Voyager 1 is an estimated 4.5 billion miles away from our planet Earth. NASA says it takes roughly two days to receive a response from the spacecraft after sending a message. They may be able to solve the issue through software updates. Potentially one of the spacecrafts were done at hardware systems could be of help, but keep in mind NASA is going to lose touch with both probes in the next few years when they run out of their energy supply. Oh yeah, the plutonium is going to run out. I guess it wouldn't make sense to refuel. 1.21. You can't get out there fast enough to give it some. Yeah, not 14.5 billion miles away from Earth. No, not yet. We're just not going to be able to get out there. Not yet, some day. Some day we'll be able to go fast enough that we'll be able to go out and swap out the batteries. I know. I feel like Voyager 1 is just tired. Voyager 1 is like, man, I've been doing this since 1977. I don't know where I am anymore. I'm just going to send you weird stuff. I don't have any good data for you. I'm fine. I just don't remember where I am. That's really what literally is going on. I'm beyond Pluto. I don't know. Where do I go? No one else has ever been out here. Don't tell me where I am. Oh gosh. All right, let's check out the mailbag. All right, let's do it. This one comes from Brian. Brian thinks he found a GPU selling below MSRP, which not that long ago we thought was imposterous. He writes, the 360 Ti that Roger mentioned is available on sites like New Egg and Best Buy for under $600 just in time for Nvidia to announce the 40XX line for what it's worth. Yeah. MSRP is $399 on a 3060 Ti. And we could only find on New Egg one for $569.99. So this is I know that New Egg says $579.99 slashed out. It's available $569.99, which would make you, would lead you to believe that that meant it was below MSRP. However, the $579.99 is not always MSRP. If you're able to get a little info graphic on that, sometimes it's MSRP, sometimes it's the average selling price so that they can show you whether you're paying more or less than the average selling price. By the way, if you're paying more, they won't show you that strikeout price. So I don't think these are selling less than MSRP, right, Patrick? It's 150% MSRP for a 3060 Ti. But merely having GPUs in stock is a huge step up. And it's not 2x MSRP. So I'm going to look at the glass being half full here and slowly trickling towards being full. Yes, it's available. It's not twice the price. And we are, to Brian's credit, we are seeing more GPUs getting closer to MSRP and definitely being at stock, for sure. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a bunch that were like 30% over SMRP, I think, or maybe I did the bath wrong. So in any case, simply having cards in stock is still kind of a weird and disturbing. You know, there was an aisle at my local micro center that would have like the four cards nobody wanted to buy. And the rest of this 25 foot long aisle on both sides was just empty glass locked cabinets. So actually seeing inventory. Like actual cards in the boxes. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to spend that much. But if I did, I could. You're like becoming the hardware hunter, like the Raspberry Pis and the GPUs and all that. You know, that's, let's call a lifetime. Let's see. What do you want to do at the show? Here we find the GPU above MSRP, but in its natural habitat. You want a PS5? Patrick Norton's on the case. He's going to knock on that man's door and get that PS5, yeah. Is the camouflage of a hardware hunter? Just a bunch of chips. So is it like just green? Yeah. Where people are like, oh, I thought you were just a chip tree. Oh no, you're a human. Probably better than wearing the professional hunter outfit with the tan shorts and the shirt with all the pockets on it. Please dress up like that and go into a hardware store or go into a computer center and film yourself. With a chip in every pocket and just be like, what are you going to do now? Scotty Vest. Terrifying local. That's something I would like to see Len Peralta draw someday. Local terrifier enters store. Len Peralta, what have you drawn for us today though? Hey man, it's time for pie. You know, we talk about raspberry pie. Sometimes these images end up drawing themselves. This is what I was talking about Tom. You know, this is kind of low-hanging fruit, but this is an image of Patrick Norton. Eating raspberry pie. Or he's also eating the actual raspberry pie. Oh no, don't eat an actual raspberry pie. Yes. Or do eat an actual raspberry pie. Don't eat the computer. Exactly. If you are a fan of raspberry pies, either one, you can get this right now on my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len. It's there for you if you're just back at the DTNES lover level. Or you can get it at my online store, LenPeraltaStore.com. It's right there on the front page right now. So go check it out. Excellent work as always. Len, also excellent to have Patrick Norton with us today. Patrick, where can people keep up with everything else that you do? Oh, you can tweet at me at Patrick Norton. And I'm still doing the podcast with Robert Herron, AVXL. You can search for AVXL in your favorite podcatcher or head over to AVXL.com to find all the links where we talk about home theater and audio. Good stuff. Also good stuff is Sean Patton. Sean Patton is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNES. And we would like to thank Sean for all the years of your support. Sean. Sean. Sean. Sean for Prez. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet Rules right in after DTNES, available at patreon.com slash DTNES. Just a reminder, we do the show live. Monday through Friday. We're live. 4 p.m. Eastern, 20-hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Please join us live. If you can, we're back Monday with Aaron Carson, who's going to talk about the role that tech plays in the possible extinction of humanity. This week's episodes of Daily Tech New Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer and writer and host Rich Strathilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our Mods! Beatmaster, W. Scottus 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Gadget Virtuoso, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reis, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show include Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Patrick Norton. Guests on this week's show was Max Scoville and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.