 Coming up on DTNS, why Apple should make a budget phone, how Snapchat snapped back in India and the first QD OLED display ships. So we'll tell you what QD OLED is. This is the Daily Tech News for March 9th, 2022. It's Wednesday in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Marin. And from Studio Redmond, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang. The show was pretty smooth. We were just talking about cars on good day internet. You can get that wider show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Trust us, it's a riveting conversation. Big thanks to our top patrons, including Dr. X17, Entropy UK and Dustin Campbell. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. When Apple revealed its Apple M1 Ultra system on a chip in its event on Tuesday, it said it had the world's most powerful processor. Independent benchmarks of the processor are starting to show up. First on the Geekbench 5 database, with a 1793 score on a single core and 24,055 for multi-core benchmarks. How does that compare to other chips? Intel's older Lake flagship, the Core i9-12900K CPU, has a 14% higher overall score, but is 20% lower than the M1 Ultra in multi-threaded tasks. AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 3970X was 39% worse in single core, and even with 32 cores only had 7% better performance multi-core than the 20-core M1 Ultra. AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU came in 13% slower in single core and 37% slower in multi-core tests. Overall, pretty favorable early marks, and they are early for the M1 Ultra. Yeah, Intel can say, yeah, you can't say you're the most powerful based on these benchmarks, but we'll see. Okay, we got more benchmarks to come. As part of an executive order for reports on the risks and benefits of cryptocurrency, the president of the United States ordered formal consideration of a central bank digital currency. That would be a cryptocurrency issued by a nation's bank. We've talked a lot about those mostly coming out of China. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has been evaluating the idea, but as we've said before, made clear it will not take steps to create one until it's authorized by the government to do so. So, part of this executive order has the U.S. Department of Justice studying what action Congress would need to take in order to create a digital currency in the United States. In a blog post, Google explained how archiving certain Android apps will help free up space on a device. Archiving is like a partial install and can shrink an app by up to 60% without removing the app completely from a device. This is possible using existing Android APKs, and the option will come to developers with the Bundle Tool 1.10 release and will become functional after Google launches the feature to the general public later this year. We don't have an exact date, but it's coming. Developers can opt out of archived APKs if they so desire. TikTok announced a new feature called Sound On, which will let musicians upload songs directly and then get royalties for people playing them. You can manage that through a designated artist platform if you want. TikTok is going to pay musicians 100% of royalties for the first year, and then after that the royalties are split 90-10. Sound On has been in beta since last year, and now it's open to all musician creators. We have more tech companies announcing changes related to the war in Ukraine. Essential Internet Service provider Lumen is shutting down all business in Russia because of security risks. With the shutdown of Cogent, Russian telecoms will have a more difficult time finding transit and other backbone-like services. Amazon has stopped accepting new AWS customers in Russia and Belarus, will not sell its video game New World in Russia, has stopped providing Prime Video in Russia, and will no longer ship retail products to customers in Belarus and Russia. Nintendo has indefinitely delayed its video game Advanced Wars 1x2 reboot camp. The game's plot involves a country invading a neighboring country as part of a plot to destabilize world order. One might assume it's bad timing. And this is not a reaction, but Ars Technica has a good article from the Financial Times republished for free that talks about the efforts back in October and November to shore up Ukrainian cyber defenses. If you're wondering why there hasn't been more cyber fallout for lack of a better word in Ukraine, that Ars Technica article is worth a read. Twitter has launched a version of its website that is compatible with the Tor Onion service, the Onion Router Onion service. I know that's redundant, but that's kind of how you say it. Tor optimizes for privacy protection and sites that are compatible with Tor can get around blocks and filters because unlike a VPN, it's relayed a lot. Twitter joins the BBC, Facebook, ProPublica, and others in offering Tor specific versions of their sites. You have to be using the Tor browser or some other Tor compatible browser in order to get to these sites. And you have to know the incredibly complex link that ends dot onion, but is full of just random characters. So you have to get the link directly. It's not something you're going to memorize. Tor routes requests through at least three relays around the world, which makes it impossible, almost impossible to block, and also makes it almost impossible to tell who originated a request. There can be some information leak at the endpoints, but while it's moving around, it's pretty hard to trace back. A site that operates at a dot onion address can also work more efficiently with the Tor system and lock down a few more privacy leaks. So yeah, you can go to Twitter.com in the Tor browser, but having a dot onion specific address makes it work a lot better. One immediate benefit is that you can get Twitter, even if it's blocked by an ISP this way, if you use the Tor address, you get the thing at the Tor address. You're not going to get redirected by somebody along the way. You either get the thing or nothing at all. It also helps Twitter detect malicious actors on their end who might be using Tor to attack their site or do automated scraping now that they're operating within the system. Governments can and do try to block the Tor network in general, but a workaround is to use something called a Tor bridge, which is essentially another Tor relay that's not widely known and therefore not blocked by the government. And then that gets you into the system and all the rest works the way it normally works. I know a lot of this would be rightfully so attributed to the war in Ukraine, but I wonder, and I was thinking about this earlier, how long has Twitter had this in development and just said, now's the time to roll it out. We finally have a great reason for a lot of people to be able to use something like this for their own safety and for anonymity and privacy. But what other companies besides Twitter can make use of this that haven't already? Yeah, I think you're right. Twitter was working on this before. It's not like they whipped this up in the past three weeks. Alec Muffet, who posted about this for Twitter, called it a long-awaited tweet and also called it the most important that I've ever composed. And that implies that they were working on this for a long time, but maybe they hurried up and got finished because of the war in Ukraine. And when you look at sites that do have dot onion, Facebook's had one for a long time in part to help people who are in regions where the government is cracking down and blocking Facebook to be able to communicate with other people on Facebook. I know that most of the world talks about Facebook in regards to privacy violations, but companies are big and full of a lot of people and very complex. And this is a situation where Facebook is doing something that really doesn't benefit. It doesn't make extra ad dollars off the Tor network and it doesn't pay for itself. It does it because this really does help people to access the service and use it for important situations in places like Myanmar, for example, where the government is trying to shut it down. There's all kinds of criticisms you can rail against Facebook. I'm not trying to let them off the hook for that, but it's possible to hold two different ideas about something. This is one of them. And so I think Twitter is doing the same thing. They're not going to get a huge benefit out of this, but it does help people and I think that's why they're doing it. Well, and as you mentioned, it requires a bit of jumping through hoops to be able to use a Tor compatible browser. Some of you out there are like, yeah, I'm familiar. Other people might be a little not as familiar, but it's a good option, especially in this day and age. And keep in mind that the Tor version of any of these sites doesn't protect you from the site operator spying on you. So going back to that Facebook or even Twitter conversation, like once you're logged in, they can see everything you do. You have to be trusting the site operator at that point. But if somebody is trying to stop you from getting there, then the Tor website can help you around that. Well, let's start the next story with some context because I think it will be helpful. Back in April of 2017, a widely adopted hashtag boycott Snapchat campaign started in India following a variety report that alleged Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said he didn't want to expand his business into poor countries, like India and Spain. Now Spiegel denies ever saying this, but pushback ensued as it does when things like this circulate. Take note, Snap's India user base at the time was less than 5 million. That is a very small portion of Snap's overall market share. Snap's Android app also full of issues at the time. However, in 2019, Snap hired former Facebook executive Durgash Kausik as its managing director for South Asia. Within his first year on the job, Snap rebuilt and launched on Android in nine Indian languages. Snap also offered augmented reality lenses to celebrate 75 Indian festivities, including Diwali, Onam, Independence Day, big stuff. Makes a really big impression on a country of many billions of people. Now Snap has more than 100 million monthly active users in India. That is the largest market outside the US. The US was its first market. India, it is a close second. Adding to the growth, it's partnered with game developer Moonfrog Labs, e-commerce brand Sugar Cosmetics, and Sony and Zee as media channels. And then just hang it up somewhere else and expect it to work. Some models have proved fairly adaptable to that, Facebook for one, Twitter as another. Because they're limited in letting the, they're limited in what they provide and the user makes use of it. Whereas Snapchat plays a little more of an intermediary part. And what they learned here was, if you pay attention to what the community wants and you have someone running the regional version from that community, you're much more likely to make features that make that community excited to use your product. I mean, localization is a buzzword, but it's very important and this shows it. Yeah, the whole sort of like backlash, you know, Snap doesn't care about, you know, the Indian people, that aside. And, you know, I'm not going to say, you know, what exactly happened there, but there was a lot of backlash because, you know, many folks in the country felt not only underrepresented but straight up dist. To have somebody come in and be like, you know what, all right, we're going to change the perception of, you know, how you feel about Snap and its products in the country and also do a lot of personalization that means a lot to people in this country and make a fun. I mean, you know, this was just in 2019. Sure. I mean, some companies turn things around in shorter periods of time, but for a company as big as Snap, for a market share as big as it has grabbed in India since it hired its new executive, I think that's pretty commendable. Yeah, and it's partnered with local companies. Another short video app called Moj they partnered with. Would you think like, oh, no, they'd be going head to head? No, they partnered with them, crossed, you know, did some cross posting, brought influencers from Moj over to Snap. They enabled AR tech within Flipkart so you could like virtually try on your Nikes and stuff like that. Again, Flipkart is a big way to shop in India. You don't want to partner with something that is not popular. And so it's just knowing the culture, knowing the trends, knowing what's popular, knowing what's important, knowing, I mean, there's so many languages in India. How do you pick nine? Well, they apparently pick the right nine, right? So there's just so much about this that I think is a good lesson for other companies who are like, yeah, how do I succeed in emerging markets like India, Nigeria, Kenya? This is one of the ways. This is one of the things, maybe not the only thing, but one of the things you'll want to want to do. Yep. Robert Herron told us about QD OLED back during CES. It's a combination of Quantum Dot and OLED display tech. The benefit of OLED is that each pixel is its own light source. So when that pixel is off, it's completely dark. You don't have a backlight that you have to like block out. Even when it's right next to a bright pixel, you got good contrast. The tradeoff, though, is your overall brightness isn't as high, partly because there's a color filter, since the LED is just one color in an OLED. So you have to have a color filter to add color. That brings down the brightness some. And also, if you try to drive the pixel brightness too much in the individual pixels, you're going to shorten its life. So there's a balance there. That's why LCDs might be a little brighter, but they're not as good as the contrast. Quantum Dot or QLED uses Quantum Dots that can convert white LED, not OLED, but just regular LED light to color without a loss of energy. So you have the LED send the white light to the Quantum Dot. The Quantum Dot turns it red, green, blue, etc. They can achieve better brightness because of that, but you do lose some of the contrast and the deep blacks that you have with OLED because you're still using the LED backlight. There's something called MiniLED that helps with that sum, but the big win is expected to be this QD OLED. It tries to get the best of both worlds, the Quantum Dot and the OLED. You use blue OLED pixels and combine those with a red and green tuned Quantum Dot sub-pixel to change the color. That gets rid of the color filter so you're not dimming the image, and you keep the precise dimming control of being able to turn individual pixels on and off. QD OLED TVs use Samsung-made panels. They were all over CES. The first TVs are coming soon from Sony, but the first shipping QD OLED screen is a 34-inch curved gaming monitor from Alienware. The Verge's Cameron Faulkner is among those who got an early look at it. It promises up to 1,000 nits peak brightness. It hurts my eyes to just think about. Supports NVIDIA G-Sync for low latency HDR, has a resolution of 3440x1440. Alienware's QD OLED monitor is available now for 1,300 bucks, and it'll even work with game consoles, though the Verge points out game consoles are built for 4K OLED TVs and it kind of shows. This monitor is really best suited for your PC gaming. Among the advantages for PC gamers are on-screen settings that are meant for gaming, unlike your TV, which is meant for watching Netflix, and burn-in is warrantied for. So burn-in for OLED TVs is not much of a concern anymore, but it can still be a problem for PC setups, so Alienware gives you a three-year warranty against burn-in. So crisp, wonderful-looking video gaming monitor using QD OLED. Well, first of all, because I'm in the camp too, don't worry if you say OLED, LED, QD, OLED, and get confused. Here's my question. Of these specs, and they sound great, what would be the PC gaming on-screen setting, the overlay, that would be great for gaming but not great for something like a Netflix show? Well, because you want to handle things like frame rate, you want to be able to get into some pixel refreshing and things like that that are available in your TV, but they're buried. What this does is say, we know you're using this for gaming, so pop one button, those settings come up and you can futz with them to your heart's content. That's cool, yeah. I'm not in the market for a QD OLED right this second, but I sure would love to know if anybody is in the market and gets one of these and has thoughts on how it looks. And if you want to suggest a story, you're like, why aren't you covering AFB OLED? Well, first of all, because it doesn't exist. But if you did find a story that showed that something did exist, you can let us know in our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Counterpoint research estimates that in 2021, the best-selling phones, not phone maker, but best-selling individual models of phones were iPhones. The top five were iPhones. Number one was the iPhone 12, because it was out all year. Number two, the iPhone 12 Pro Max, because it was more expensive than the iPhone 12. Number three, the iPhone 13, which was only out for part of the year. Number four, the iPhone 12 Pro. And number five, the iPhone 11, because it was still on sale for part of the first part of the year. Here's where it gets interesting. Number six is not an iPhone. First non-iPhone on the list is the Samsung Galaxy A12. Not the S21, not the S20. It's the A12, Samsung's budget Galaxy phone. A solid phone, if you don't want to spend $1,000 on a phone. And it sells right now for less than 200 bucks. Number seven is the Xiaomi Redmi 9A. That one hovers around $100. Again, these are worldwide. Apple returns at number eight with its cheapest phone, the iPhone SE 2020, which sold for $399 at the time, 2021. At number nine, the $1,600 iPhone 13 Pro Max, the most expensive iPhone you could get last year. And number 10, the $200 or so Xiaomi Redmi 9. So it's Apple and bargain phones. Now, Apple's new iPhone SE just announced yesterday is $30 more than the SE that made this list. Yet CNBC says analysts expect Apple to still sell around 30 million Apple iPhone SEs this year. It's likely the most powerful phone at its price point. And even with just sub six gigahertz 5G, it's got 5G. So it's in line with similarly priced competitive Android phones. Given this list, though, Sarah, doesn't make you wonder what would happen if Apple made a truly budget phone, like a $200 phone? Sure, because the SE, as nice as the announcement was about how great it is yesterday that we covered on the show, you know, it's above $400. So yes, something that was half of that. I mean, that's just not what Apple does. I mean, Apple will slash prices because it's like, eh, we got to move merch because now we have the newer cooler thing. That's that's pretty, you know, that that's standard. Lots of companies do that. But Apple has this thing where it it wants to be the company that cares so much about the quality, cares so much about the consumer experience, cares so much about things to the point that we have to make it more expensive than all the other all the other options because we care about you. So I don't think that Apple I don't think Apple wants wants to be in this in this market, even though clearly they sell like hotcakes. Yeah. And I don't think we disagree that if they put out a $200 phone that was feature competitive with Android phones at the same price with the a with the Samsung Galaxy A12. I lost it in my notes for a second. Thank you. That they wouldn't dominate this list. Here's the theory though, because you're not wrong up until now Apple has always been like, Nope, highest quality doesn't matter what the price is. The SE is only the SE because we can make a quality phone at that price. That's the cheapest we can make a phone that we are satisfied with. What if though, the pivot to services is having an effect on Apple. So they want to make their money off of Apple TV plus hence getting baseball. They want to make their money off of fitness plus they want to make their money off of any of those subscriptions they bundle into Apple one. And to do that, one thing it frees them to do I was thinking about this in relation to the the M1 Ultra that that studio computer is going to last a long time. You aren't going to need to upgrade it. And everybody always accuses Apple of planned obsolescence. I've always thought of it as happenstance obsolescence. Like, man, we don't mind that products go obsolete. But what if they're looking at it and saying, we've made such a good ship, people are not going to have to replace this computer for a long time. But we're going to make subscription revenue. So even if they don't replace the hardware, we can make money off them. Could that justify a cheaper phone of like, yeah, and imagine if we could get this cheaper phone into more people's hands granted, not all of them are going to be able to also afford a monthly subscription. But because it's so cheap, maybe some of them will. And then we increase that subscriber base and that subscription revenue. Well, I mean, the story has always been Apple makes all of its money off of hardware revenue. That that is where Apple makes it spread and butter. All the other stuff is either a loss leader or something that just gets you to buy that hardware. Yes. At what point do we get to the point where Apple's like, yeah, please buy our really expensive hardware. But if you don't, let's get you into our ecosystem subscription fees that, you know, will over time, you know, hopefully you enjoy the experience, but whatever over time, we'll get a lot more money out of you, which is that is not new. This is not Apple reinventing the wheel here, but it could be like you said, the first point that Apple's like, you know what, we're going to allow a lot of people into the ecosystem that just, I mean, they either couldn't play at all or they had to have a super old phone and it didn't play well anyway. Yeah. And the problem before was if you put out a bottom level spec phone for cheap, it gets obsolete real fast, except that's not as true as it used to be. We may be getting to the point where they could put out a, you know, the iPhone express. It's, you know, it's still going to be good for, for five years, but with minimum specs and only cost, even if it costs you $300 instead of $1 or $200, I feel like that enough people would pay the Apple tax, even at that price point. The iPhone minus iPhone. I'm just kidding. I know. Terrible idea. iPhone light. iPhone express. I was like, Choo Choo train. I'm in, I'm in already. Well, listen, folks, I have a meme alert to alert you to, uh, you, you maybe have, uh, are familiar with this. I was not until this very morning. There is a community of folks using sensors connected to various plants and also mushrooms known as fungi to make synthesized music. You may have seen the results on Pancamp, perhaps YouTube, maybe TikTok. Now, some artists say that the plants aren't actually directly, directly making the music themselves, but they, they, the artists are using electrodes, which can then measure tiny fluctuations in the electrical current between different areas of the plant and that data can then be repurposed in the creation process, such as translating into notes within a certain key. Wind speed, temperature, humidity, all things that affect plants can play a role in the eventual music that is created. One TikToker said that he started uploading under the pseudonym Modern Biology back in April. I have no apology, by the way, Modern Biology. And then after plugging his system into an ink cap mushroom, found it outside his front door, said, let's see how it goes. Recorded the results. And then that video got over 25 million views. People are interested. He recommends the program Plant Wave for anybody interested in getting into the plant synth game. Joe Patitushi, who's the CEO of DataGarden, which makes Plant Wave, says the Plant Wave came about after more than a decade of working in this kind of general space. And the Verge notes that back in 2012, so, you know, more than a decade ago, a decade ago, DataGarden was invited to create an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they hooked up electrodes to four plants with an algorithm designed by Patitushi, transforming the data into harmonies. So if you, if you're really interested in this, check out Jay Castillo's article on the Verge. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And, and I found some, a Philodendron playing a synthesizer on YouTube. Sounds like me playing piano, frankly. Sounds like something you might do on mushrooms. Yeah. With mushrooms. Don't eat the Philodendron, though. Now, but, but from what I gathered from what you were saying, and in Castillo's article, a lot of these folks are not doing that where they're doing real time. They're, they're doing that and then using that as an inspiration to make another tune that is probably a little more accessible. Indeed. Yeah. You know, the, the general consensus is the plants aren't telling us what to play, but based on the way that plants not only move, but react to their environments in ways that are unexpected, or at least two humans make something that sounds kind of fun and surprises and delights. Yeah. Plant. Your plant could like play bass. You know, I imagine a fern would, would play a pretty mean bass. Dire Straits. Yeah. New band member. The palm tree on drums. He doesn't mind. Yeah. Philodendron on synth. Anyway, good stuff. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. All right. Brian M64 wanted to weigh in on Apple AirPods versus AirPods Pro versus other options that you might have. We've been talking about in-ear Bluetooth headphones and what works for folks and what doesn't. Brian says, I consider myself an Apple fanatic. We just have pretty much everything Apple has to offer. iMac, MacBook Pro, the M1 Max version, Apple TV4K, everybody has their iPad. We have three of us in the house, also AirTags. I used to have the Apple Watch, but that's for another email. Brian, do email us about that because I'm about to get one. Brian says, here's the point. I also had the AirPods and then I got the AirPods Pro and gave my wife the hand-me-downs. I found that my ear canal got irritated. Although I don't have any known allergies, I thought I might be sensitive to silicone. So I reached, researched them and got the thumb tips for the AirPods Pro, still irritated by something being in my ear, bummer. I found the shots, bone conduction headphones, absolutely love them. Depending on the model, they're probably one-half the price of Apple products, depending on if you can get to sale, of course. One downside is proprietary magnetic charging cables, but I find them comfortable to exercise in that walking, rowing machine, et cetera. So they're the Shox SHOKZ headphones. If you want to take a look at them, these are cool. Now, they're the ones that have the cable connecting the two earbuds. They're not free-floating. At least it doesn't look like they have any models that are free-floating. Some folks really prefer that though. But yeah, exactly. The more I talk to people about particularly when jogging or, I don't know, anything, if you're going doing begging or anything else where you're going to be kind of bouncing around a lot, you know, some folks are like, no, I just, I don't, if I lose one and it's not attached to the other one, that's a bad deal. I actually kind of thought about maybe going that route in the future. Yeah. Thank you, Brian. This is a good alternative for folks. Love hearing about that. Yeah. Thanks, Brian. Also, we'd like to send a special thanks to our top lifetime supporters and Dale McCahy. I know we talked about you earlier this week, but we're going to give you a big old thank you again. Thank you for all your years of support, Dale. You are the best. And we should go get whiskey and Kit Kats. Indeed. Thank you, Dale. And if you are 11 people, we are, we are 11 people short of where we were with Patreon last month. So all, so all 11 of you, please support us at Patreon and keep us loud, live and independent. We are funded majority by you. And that's why we are responsive only to you, the listener. So, so please, if you've been thinking about it, now's the time. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Reminder for folks who want or can catch us live, we are live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC for a couple more days anywhere in the U S, but don't worry about that now. Find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Len Peralta and Justin rubber young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants.com