 Coming up on DTNS, Samsung's thin slick laptops for business and gaming, why Eddie Q wanted Apple to make iMessage for Android. And would you stream your browser from a cloud service? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about what we would put in eggnog. If you would like that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Consumer Technology Association or CTA announced that CES is officially returning to a partial in person format in Las Vegas from January 5th through the 8th, 2022 while still allowing some attendees to virtually participate. The CTA had previously announced this timeline back in July of 2020 after shifting CES 2021 to an all digital format. EFA 2021 also plans to host in-person events this fall. I wonder if I could partially attend in person. Now, a quarterly earnings extravagance alphabet beat analysts expectations in Q1 with $55.31 billion in revenue. Standouts were cloud revenue, which jumped 45%. That's an important one for them. Other bets, the non-Google part of alphabets, saw revenue up 46%. The losses increased slightly to $1.15 billion. YouTube ad revenue, which Alphabet has only reported since February 2020, increased 48% on the year to $6 billion. Analysts predict YouTube will bring in between $29 and $30 billion in revenue this year. That's on par with Netflix, which is expected to report around $29.7 billion in revenue for 2021 later. Decreased handset sales following Huawei's spin-off of its Honor brand back in November resulted in Huawei's second consecutive quarterly revenue decline down 16.5% on the year to $152.2 billion Chinese won or $23.5 billion US dollars. Huawei did see its profit margin increase to 11.1% due to cost cutting and also generating $600 million from 5G patent royalties. That's not looking good. As part of its Q3 earnings report, Microsoft reported that LinkedIn's ad business generated more than $3 billion in revenue last year, up more than 60% on the year. Company also reported that Microsoft Teams now has more than 145 million daily active users, up 93% on the year. Netflix has made its experimental shuffle feature official. Starting now, all Netflix users on TVs will get a play something button that will automatically play TV shows and movies that they've never watched before. These Netflix doesn't think they have. Selections will be based on the kinds of things you already are watching. Sometimes it'll be something entirely new. Other times it may draw from series you've started or things on your watch list. The button will appear underneath your profile when you log in in the left side navigation and in the 10th row on the homepage. The button will also make its way beyond just TV based versions to Android soon. All right, let's talk about those big Samsung announcements. Samsung unpacked. We knew it was probably going to be about laptops because of the shape of the invite and we were not disappointed. Samsung announced new Intel Evo certified laptops. Those are the ones with long battery life and they opened wake really fast. Samsung announced the Galaxy Pro premium laptop and the Galaxy Pro 360 2-in-1 convertible. Both of them in 13.3 and 15.6 inch display sizes. The laptops sync with other Galaxy devices. This is one of the big value proposition. So you can start work on a phone, a Galaxy phone, and then continue it on a laptop or vice versa. They also connect with Galaxy tablets, Galaxy Buds, Smart Home devices, and Smart Things Find tags. There's a custom Bluetooth implementation that can connect to Galaxy Buds instantly so you don't have to go in and choose them. Quick share allows for fast file transfer between Galaxy devices and you can expand a display onto a Galaxy tablet similar to the way Apple's sidecar works. You can also take calls, check notifications, and run up to five apps simultaneously on your laptop from your Galaxy phone. So you can use your laptop's power and see it and control it on your phone. These new laptops run on Intel's 11th Gen Core i5 or i7 processors, Iris Z graphics, Wi-Fi 6e support, LTE, and 5G models will be available for the Galaxy Pro 360. Wi-Fi versions are available for pre-order now starting at $999 shipping May 14th. Samsung also announced two entry-level laptops. These are just kind of bargain versions of the Galaxy Book Pro. Galaxy Book is a 15.4 inch laptop for $800. Specs vary depending on the country but it does all that sinking stuff. So the display to the Galaxy tablet, the fast Galaxy Buds pairing, link to Windows, and has an optional nano SIM tray for LTE. That one's coming to the US in the second half of the year. There's also a two-in-one Galaxy Book Flex2 Alpha, the longest name of the new announcements, 13.3 or 15.6 inch sizes. That one starts at $849 for pre-order now shipping mid-May. But the CUDA GROSS is the Galaxy Book Odyssey, a gaming focused 15.6 inch laptop running on Intel's 11th Gen Core H series processors and the first laptop with the Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU. You can configure this one up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, up to two terabytes of storage, has an enhanced cooling system, and it's available in August. So you have to wait a few months starting at $1,399 in multiple markets. They didn't say which one's quite yet. Well, it's not the most maxed out gaming rig for portables but it's a pretty good one and almost it feels like there's less in those places to get ahold of any RTX cards of any make and sounds like maybe this will be an easier one to get ahold of if you're just trying to game on the go. But I'm really impressed with this device. The only thing that I would caution gamers, not caution them, but just say, you know, if you're ready to take your gaming on the road or be more portable with your gaming and you'd like to be a PC gamer, just know that we're about to see a whole bunch of sort of cloud-based gaming services either come out of beta or that are already on the market. Things like GeForce's own GeForce Now service and the upcoming XCloud which is currently in beta and expected to be released soon, Stadia and others. A lot of these services are going to provide the kinds of fidelity that you would expect from it being native on your computer, but you could get away with it with your crappy old Chromebook that you barely use anymore. I think those days are coming sooner than later. So I see this sort of thing and I get super excited because I'm a nerd for this stuff and I love it. But then I go, but soon I'll be able to kind of pull that off with a service that as long as I've got decent internet, I'll be able to kind of experience this the way I want to anyway, so I really need to do this. So I don't know, I feel torn, Tom. It's a little bit torn. They'll split in the middle on this issue. Yeah, I think it's interesting to see what Samsung's doing where they emphasized in the announcement the engineering involved. And Samsung has great engineering expertise. They talked a lot about using their mobile knowledge to make these laptops as thin as your phone, to make them as long lived with the battery as your phone. There was a lot of trying to encourage you to live a mobile lifestyle inside Samsung. So taking a page from Apple's book and saying, like, look, if you have a Galaxy phone and a Galaxy laptop and some Galaxy Buds and some smart things, look at all these amazing things you can do. It's a compelling story, and these are beautiful laptops and well-specced, too. Yeah, they look really good. 32 gigabytes of RAM is some would say overkill for even the best of gaming rigs, but that's amazing. So lots of RAM is great. A couple of terabytes of storage. Like this is in every way a really good gaming solution. I just worry about those streaming services coming into their own and soon. So watch for that, I guess. Yeah, side note, too. They were really partnering with Intel on this. This was Intel's chance to go, like, look at us, we do mobile things. Look how great we are. And they were. They were good products. So good for Intel, too. Well, there's more earnings that came out today. In fact, as we do the show, Apple and Facebook are rolling out their earnings as well. But in its earnings report, Sony disclosed it sold 7.8 million PlayStation 5 consoles, that's as of March 31, 2021, with 3.3 million units shipped in Q1 alone. That outsells the PS4's 7.6 million units sold in its first fiscal year. So a very good year for the PS5. Sony's game and network services division had its biggest year ever with $25 billion in revenue. And the company also saw PlayStation Plus subscribers grow 14.7% to 47.6 million. Those are really good numbers across the board. And I think it says one thing that maybe we have been, we've all been sort of blaming lack of PlayStation 5s on strictly slow down during the pandemic, production issues, pipeline problems, all the things that we talk about a lot on this show. And I'm not so sure that's true. Those have definitely affected their ability to get more fresh models on the store shelves so that we can keep punching through these. But what this tells me is they sold just fine. In fact, they sold way better than any other PlayStation before it. This is a success by any measure. The long tail of this particular generation is still a story yet to be told. But I think Sony's probably pretty happy with where they're at. Yeah. I guess the question is, how many more could they have sold? Did they not have that supply chain constraint? Because you can't say that there isn't demand. You can't say nobody got them when they're 7.8 million sold. This is the most PlayStation's ever sold. One of the reasons you can't get a PlayStation is because they are flying off the shelves because more people want a PlayStation than have ever wanted one before. Combine that with pandemic-related shortages, supply chain issues, chip shortages, et cetera. And of course, it's difficult to get this. This is what happens when you have unexpectedly high demand. You can criticize Sony and say they should have expected it to be high. But whenever I see that the amount sold is more than they sold on the last generation, to me that means like, okay, well, maybe even Sony didn't expect that. Yeah. The only thing about this I would say is there's a bit of a strategic twist to this. And that is that because there are literal chip shortages and production issues that are haunting everybody, not just them, they're now in a position where they really do want to keep the momentum going. And it's a strong brand and we'll probably do just fine overall anyway. But this gives Microsoft, who has a hard time getting their machines on shelves as well because of demand, it gives them an opportunity to tout services and say Game Pass is great and do all of these things to sort of take the attention away from people who are patiently waiting for their PlayStation and maybe say, well, what about this over here? And then start making some conversions. That's possible. We don't know what the, I don't know what the numbers like that look like, but I'd be really curious to see if that actually has an impact. I know more people getting Xboxes at the moment than can get PlayStation. And so I guess good for Microsoft, but maybe that makes Microsoft doesn't have the same sell through that Sony did. So this story has yet to be told, and we've got a few years to find out how it all pans out, but it's my favorite thing about the consoles and the quote unquote war between them because it's just really fun to watch the machinations. But the bottom line here is Sony did great. And these numbers have to make shareholders and probably their players pretty happy. All right, let's go for a ride, Scott. Yeah, let's go for a ride. Everybody hop in the back of my car. Please try to not mess up the floor. Uber announced new features Wednesday to make ride hailing profitable. Still not a profitable business. In the U S you can now book a vaccine appointment at Walgreens and the ride there and back at the same time. Sorry, at the back at the same time, all in the same Uber app. Okay, so you can just say, I'm going to get this thing done. It'll take you there and do it. Uber rent, let you book a rental car and have it dropped off for you at home or an airport. So you're getting off a flight. Boom, there's your rental car. Uber reserve let you book a ride from an airport. That includes flight tracking and up to 60 minutes, wait time for curbside pickup. So lots of time to go get your luggage, get it off the carousel, be out front and ready for your car. Pick up and go, let you order food out of taking a ride and have a driver stop along the route so that you can pick the food up. A schedule button lets you order items for delivery when merchants are closed and there's an option to add on items from a second merchant to an existing order with no additional delivery fees. Uber calls this it's new go get strategy because you can use the features to go places or have someone get you something. It's designed to make Uber profitable this year. That's what they say. Uber had a record march as far as bookings and sales went. So that's good news. But from less profitable delivery services or services rather. So go get or go get builds out more profitable ride hailing options and adds more delivery services with very little additional cost to the user. Yeah, so this is Uber's chance to maximize its profits. They've been saying for a while that they expect to be profitable this year at least on an EBITDA basis, business, business, business. But even on that basis, that would be a big step because they need to bring ride hailing back. People are finally starting to get back into cars. I definitely could use a lot of these. I don't know if I'd really want to pick up food in an Uber on the way somewhere, but I don't know maybe if I'm taking food to a person's house. Maybe I don't know that could work. Yeah, the one that I was scratching my head a little bit was the Uber reserve service that allows you to book a ride from an airport. So I'm on a flight. The driver can track me. So even if I'm delayed, the driver would know that ahead of time, presumably. And then the driver might be sitting there up to an hour waiting for me to come out, but I've also been at airports where luggage is delayed, coming out type of a thing. And if you're maybe, especially in a business setting, there might be a few of you traveling at once. And it's like, let's just get this thing handled. We know that the person's going to be there waiting for us. It's going to be as seamless as possible. I also think for so long, well, I mean, Uber has not been the only game in town for many years now, but the scale was insane for Uber for a long time. It was like, this is the future. They're killing taxis. And that was the whole narrative for a long time. And the whole idea of the pandemic and people not wanting to use this service that had become very ubiquitous with travel and getting from here to there and delivery services, the delivery arm of services like Uber, Surging, but the ride-hailing stuff really taking a hit for Uber to kind of go, that's all going to come back slowly, but surely, right? We're already seeing the signs of the pendulum swinging the other way. But if we can get people to start thinking of, here's the specific reason though that hailing in Uber is a great idea for me. It's not just that I don't feel like driving. It's to do a certain thing that starts to get people thinking of, oh, I do want to do that specific certain thing that isn't free and I'm going to use Uber to do it. Yeah. It builds out more options on that profitable ride-hailing side. And then, yeah, being able to get a second thing from another merchant and no additional delivery fee, that's low cost, but they still get a cut of that sale. So that's interesting. Hey, folks, if you need just the headlines, we've got a show for you. It's called Daily Tech Headlines. You can get it with or without ads. All the essential tech news in about five minutes at DailyTechHeadlines.com. According to a deposition in the Epic versus Apple case, Apple's eddy queue pushed to create a team to support iMessage on Android. This could be helpful to Epic's case as a way to try to show Apple's thinking as being anti-competitive and not cross-platform. Previous discoveries in the case revealed a 2016 email where Phil Schiller said iMessage expansion would hurt us more than help us. The new material cites an email exchange between Q and Craig Federighi April 7th and 8th from 2013. That's some time ago. Q says in response to rumors that Google might buy WhatsApp, which was an independent company at the time, quote, do we want to lose one of our most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? They have search, mail, free video, and growing quickly in browsers. We have the best messaging app, and we should make sure it's the industry standard. I don't know what ways we can monetize it, but it doesn't cost us a lot to run. Federighi notes concern that putting iMessage on Android is not the same as getting WhatsApp users to switch to iMessage. He says, quote, to get users to switch social networks, we'd need more than a marginally better app. In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for the bulk of cell phone users, I'm concerned that iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones. Those are cited emails, but in the transcript of the deposition, a lawyer for Epic asks Q, quote, do you believe that not having iMessage on Android has created an obstacle to families giving their kids Android phones? To which Q replies, no, not at all. So it sounds to me like any Q still thinks that they wouldn't hurt their own sales if they put iMessage on Android, and these are the two different perspectives. It's really fascinating to see the actual emails and put names to the perspectives, but the two perspectives have always been, if you put iMessage on Android, more people will start to realize how great Apple services are and then want to move over to an iPhone. That's the argument for Apple music, right? That's why Apple music is on Android. Eddie Q is making that argument. Federighi is saying, I don't know. I don't think you get enough people to move over to iMessage for that to happen, and if you don't, then suddenly people who are buying phones for their kids go, oh, iMessage is on Android, I don't have to buy an iPhone SE. I can just buy my kid a cheapo Android phone and put iMessage on it, and they both have good points. Yeah, for me, I would just do it. I know this is, I don't know if this would be controversial or not, but I would just do it. I'd put it over there. I don't think it hurts Apple to do that because what you end up with, I was talking pre-show about this, but when my mom is in a group chat with us and a bunch of us are on iPhones and a couple of people are on Android phones, if you do any of the iMessage functionality on a regular text message, or excuse me, an exchange where someone is on an Android phone, it treats it like a text message to them, and instead of getting a cute little heart or a ha-ha or a thumbs up, they get a repeat of the message and then a note that says, so-and-so loved this message, and then it repeats the thing that was said. And my family's a little verbose sometimes. It's like a two-paragraph thing, and now we got to read it twice, and it's really annoying. I wish I could just say to my mom, Mom, download iMessage, then you don't have to deal with all this. You just, well, all of us will see it the way we're supposed to see it. And it doesn't mean she has to change phones. It doesn't mean she has to change stuff. I understand that's the point Apple's trying to make where some of them, with an Apple, are trying to say, well, we don't want to ever encourage people just to use another phone because our app is on it. I get that, but I think they hurt more than they helped by doing that. I think- Well, I think Federighi is more correct today than he was eight years ago. I think eight years ago he was wrong. I think Q was right. If in 2013 they had put iMessage on Android, a lot of Android users would have started to try it because they hadn't settled on a messaging system yet and been like, oh, there's some cool features here. That's cool. Oh, when I message my iOS friends, we can all do all the same things. In 2021, though, people are set- Now, Federighi's right. People are settled in WhatsApp. They're settled in Signal. They don't want to have to change, and why would they? The only people who want iOS on Android are people like Scott who are on iOS and communicating with somebody on Android. The Android users don't really care, so I think it's too late now, but it is a missed opportunity because I think Apple could have been a major player in the messaging space, and as we've seen with WhatsApp, Telegram, that can provide a lot of opportunities that you didn't foresee, but I think it's kind of too late for them now. Yep. All right. One of the promises of game streaming is that you can have the experience of a full-game machine inside a browser with services like Luna, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Stadia, but a company called Mighty would like them to hold its beer. What if we streamed the browser into the browser? Huh? Stay with me. What? Chrome users complain that the browser is too slow. This is especially true for crazy people like me who keep dozens of tabs open all the time. So Mighty will stream a Chromium browser, their own distro, their own spin off of it, it's a fork, from a powerful computer in the cloud that won't get slowed down. Mighty's server is designed specifically for browsing to keep cost and latency low. It forked Chromium to quote, integrate directly with various low-level render encoder pipelines. So this is a machine built specifically for browsing, to optimize browsing. Each browser instance runs on 16 virtual CPUs. Those run on an actual Intel Xeon processor with Nvidia GPUs and 16 gigabytes of RAM. But it's just browsing, it's optimized, so apparently that's enough. Mighty says you can load 50 to 100 tabs without stalling. It runs at 4K 60 frames per second with no noticeable lag. All of its demos right now, however, are on macOS. When you install a thin client on macOS, it uses no more than 500 megabytes of RAM. They say they'd like to bring a Windows version out, but that's where they are right now. There's some customization, too. Option tab will move you between open pages, Command M will search the Google Drive. It requires 100 megabit per second internet, which is quite a bit higher than what Stadia and Luna and those say. But Mighty originally started with the aim of streaming Windows machines, similar to Shadow, and then decided that everything shift into web apps, so why not focus on the browser? If you want to try it out, you can request access at mightyapp.com, but it's going to cost you about 30 bucks a month, apparently. Ah, that's where they lose me. They lose me in two places. That internet requirement is too much. That there's less requirement for game services that deliver a lot of data, visual data, and otherwise latency data that I don't think the browser needs to try to supersede that. So that seems crazy to me. That price is way too high. You're going to be 15 bucks for Game Pass plus XCloud on top of it. If you're going to give me a whole bunch more stuff, great, but for 30 bucks all I'm getting as a browser, no. This seems like a bad deal across the board. I was very fascinated with the story when I read about it this morning, and I was digging around Twitter, seeing what the temperature was of everybody else. And far and away, the biggest gripe was, this is completely insecure. You're just going to have all of your bank sign-ins and email passwords and all that stuff is going to travel somewhere to some sort of endpoints that if that fails, you're really in a world of hurt. And the founder of Mighty was saying, well, yeah, but you could also call your computer and point of failure. I mean, there's all sorts of places that this could happen. And if you don't trust us as a company, yeah, we're a small startup. We're not Google, right? Then you wouldn't use this anyway, but we're certainly going forward thinking that it is a secure thing that is part of our business model. And that really it's less about having faster browsing and more about not upgrading your hardware, your actual computer, because the whole thing would work a lot faster. Well, plus that trust you're talking about, that takes time to build and experience with a company and we have none of that with them. I'm not even sure I would trust this if Google suddenly said tomorrow, hey, we're going to offer this new virtual Chrome service. And it's two bucks a month, even. It's super cheap and we're super secure. I mean, I might be more inclined than these guys, but even then, let's keep doing browsing the way I do it. You know what I mean? It's a tall order. To be clear, the 30 bucks a month is not a settled price. That's what Suhail says they got five users to pay. So they may yet change that. You can hold off on making that a deal killer yet, I suppose. And the security thing is it's no different than any other cloud provider. You'll need to give me some bona fides that I can trust that you're managing things properly and patching everything on your end. But if you are, and if I feel the proper trust level there and I can audit that and see it, then yeah, it's no different than any other cloud service VM service. And it should be actually in some ways more secure because anything that's happening on the browser is actually happening on their server, not on mine. Not on my local machine. Right. I mean, in theory, there's something about this I like because I feel like everything's going to get to a place where the world is just our computer and we're just sort of pulling to very thin clients and holograms and projections from that cloud and I'm down for it. But there's a lot of questions about security and that price is too high and there's just, I don't know, there's issues. I'm sure they'll, you know, whatever they settle on, my guess is it won't be 30 bucks a month. I'm just going to say that now. My bet is we ever return to this and talk about it on a Wednesday again. My bet right now is there's no way this is 30 bucks when it's all said and done. It's too high. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not paying 360 bucks a year for a faster browser. I'll just have lag with my 100 tabs that are open at all times because I need them all, every single one of them or I'll forget things. That's how it goes. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. We had several emails in response to the story about Apple's app tracking transparency feature. We talked about that yesterday with Aaron Carson. Dwayne takes issue with the word tracking. Dwayne says it implies more than just ad targeting. He also shed some light on why small businesses, business owners are impacted by Apple's change. Dwayne writes, quote, As a small business owner, I do worry about the consequences of the diminished sale of ad platforms like Google and Facebook. My relatively small budget for marketing is better utilized in targeting my social media ads to specific potential customers. For example, our back to school campaign can be sent to just parents of a certain age in the Northeast tri-state area. The alternative is that we'd have to spend more money on more general purpose ads and just hope it has sufficient reach. Yeah. No, that's fair. Small business users do need the best targeting they can get. And so, yes. Thank you, Dwayne, for sharing that because that is something that becomes harder and when you don't have a huge ad budget, you don't want to waste it showing your ads to people who aren't interested in your stuff. Yesterday, I said that Apple's App Tracking Transparency Feature has, quote, caused Google to create a new way of tracking people in large groups. The problem, as I said, caused Google. That's not right. The UHA wrote in and explained that Flock, Google's tracking, is actually being developed as a solution for the outgoing support of third-party cookies within Chrome in 2022. And James summed it up really well. He said, Flock is in the desktop version of Chrome and is not impacted by the tracking restrictions of iOS. Flock is an alternative to third-party cookies, not an alternative to IDFA. Flock and ATT, App Transparency Technology, are only app tracking transparency, are only related in the sense that they are both attempts to limit how much tracking there is. They're both right. What I should have said is, and is being implemented for similar reasons as new ways of tracking people in large groups instead of individually called Flock's. I regret the error, but thank you for the patient understanding to UHA and James and for noting it so that we can make sure we got it right. Hey, we love all your feedback. Corrections, welcome. That's why you're part of the group. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send questions, comments, or anything else to us. Thank you in advance. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Phillip Shane Irwinster and Pat Sheeran. By the way, special thanks to Ken Hayes. Ken Hayes is in our top lifetime supporter list for DTNS. Thank you for all your years of support, Ken. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what's been going on in your world? Well, there is less than a week left on my Kickstarter for Rock Runners Incorporated, the card game I made for family's friends and anybody who feels like being competitive in a sci-fi environment. So go check out where we're at. We're about to bust through what will probably be our last stretch goal. Way more than we expected. I think it's our 10th. And there's some really cool stuff there. So go read all about it. I made a shortened URL for just today. Go to rockrunners.art. Rockrunners.art. It'll take you straight to the Kickstarter. And you'll see everything there. And thanks to everybody from this show who has helped support it. Again, that is rockrunners.art. All right. We are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Yeah, it's Thursday. Talk to you then.