 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thank you to all of you, including Peppergeese, Eric Holm, and Carmine Bailey. Coming up on DTNS, Disney continues to throw spaghetti at the streaming wall. Modular gadget design comes to headphones, and Scott Johnson is talking good and bad about the rogue ally. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 11th, 2023. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the 54th biggest city in the US, I'm Rich Travolino. From the largest prehistoric salty lake in the United States, I'm Scott Johnson. And for the biggest state of the United States, I'm Amos. Well, Lyft announced today that it's going to discontinue pooled rides. You might recall that Lyft was the first to launch shared rides back in 2014. Uber later followed with Uber Pool, but Lyft is making some changes. With that, let's start with the quick hits. WhatsApp announced that it now offers back-end updates to tackle spam calls, a particular issue in India. The company says it's using AI and machine learning systems to bring down spam call incidents. Based on reports from users, malicious actors have been making calls from phone numbers with international codes from countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, and Vietnam, often promoting fraudulent job offers. Well, US chip imports rose 13% in the first quarter of this year, as the supply chain issues are starting to subside, finally some relief. At the same time, the sources of these chips are beginning to shift. Malaysia is still the top source of US chips because that's where the packaging plans are, but the number of chips coming from Malaysia to the US fell 32% year over year. Chips from China fell 10.8%, not too surprising. Meanwhile, Thailand, Vietnam, and India all saw significant gains. Taiwan maintained its slot as the second biggest source of US chips rising 8.1%. The Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com announced that its CEO, Zhulie, will step down in June, citing personal reasons. Zhulie took over from company founder Richard Liu in April of 2022. Current CFO, Sandy Ran Zhulie, will step into the new role. Twitter is a social network, if you haven't heard of it, launched encrypted direct messages for verified users, either paid or through an organization. The launch does not support group messages and metadata is not encrypted, and it doesn't offer key checks yet that would alert a user if their conversation has been compromised by something like a man in the middle attack. Twitter says it will continue to work on improving the features, feels very V1 right now. Peloton recalled around 2.2 million bikes, specifically bike model PL-01 due to a determination there was a chance the bike could break during use. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission received more than 24 reports of the seat post, either braking or detaching during use. The model will sold in the US between January of 2018 and May of 2023. Alright Rich, let's talk a little bit more about the ever-evolving world of streaming, specifically Disney's plans going forward. Let's talk some numbers. The company lost streaming subscribers for the second quarter in a row, falling by 4 million across its properties, so combined they have 157.8 million subscribers. As before though, just for some context, the losses came mostly from declines in Disney Plus Hotstar, which lost its rights to stream Indian Premier League cricket matches last year, and if you don't know anything about cricket, that's a huge deal. In the US and Canada, Disney Plus lost about 300,000 subscribers, but added nearly 1 million in international markets if you exclude Disney Plus Hotstar. Yeah, so as for the future of all things Disney streaming, CEO Bob Iger told investors on Wednesday that the company is now offering a combined Disney Plus and Hulu app, but each app will still be offered individually. Iger also passed along that negotiations for Disney to buy out Comcast's remaining minority stake in Hulu were cordial. Also on the investor call was CFO Christine McCarthy, who said that the company is, quote, in the process of reviewing the content on our DTC services, director of consumer, to align with the strategic changes in our approach to content curation and will be removing certain content from our streaming platforms. Now, given Disney's issue with subscriber retention, looking at these latest numbers, do more options seem better or more confusing, Scott? Well, I don't know. This smells like HBO three, four months back. Remember that we were all freaking out and all this stuff they were saying at Warner and you were like, Oh, what is going on at HBO? Yeah, I have a feeling it might be the same thing going on here. Yeah, I don't think that having three apps, a separate Hulu app, a Disney Plus app and now a combined app is very great customer wise. I think it's confusing. I'm still confused about what I will end up doing as a user of those two different apps and I subscribe to them separately. I've no desire to do commercial content, so I'm not going to drop those and then do a single one for a commercial curated price. I know I can do the higher priced one and do that, but I'm already paying essentially that exact same amount of money. In fact, I think it might even be less. Maybe they're trying to push people like us out eventually so that they can unify all of this. But we talked earlier today and it's been on my mind, this idea that Disney's always seem to have a touchstone pictures side of them. For those that remember the 80s and 90s, when you'd see Touchstone, you're like, oh, this is interesting. This sort of semi-naughty PG-13 PG movie is over here and I thought Disney made it, but I guess not. It's Touchstone. Well, Touchstone was Disney and it was Disney's outlet for things that weren't. Yeah, you're not watching Cinderella. You might watch something. Exactly. You might watch Splash, you know, Touchstone film and then turn right around and watch an animated feature from Disney proper. And I always felt like after the Hulu acquisition or at least the majority acquisition, this always felt like their version of that for a modern era. So they would have Disney Plus for all the Disney Plus stuff, Star Wars, Marvel, all that fits under that umbrella pretty well. And then everything else, their deal with FX and Fox and all these other things where, you know, the contents can be a little more edgy. This isn't a site for kids necessarily, although there's a lot of kids animation. It just felt like a really smart fit to me and it seemed logical and I was totally cool with it. Now that they're talking about bringing them under one umbrella, at least as a third option, just smells a little confusing. Like, I don't think people are going to get it, especially if you're already subbed. Now, if you're not subbed at all and you might see one of these tiers and go, well, finally, I'm going to get on Disney Badm wagon, you know. Speaking of the tiers, so here are current offerings that Disney Plus, you know, I got it in my email inbox this morning. So Disney Plus and Hulu as a dual basic model is ad supported. And that gives you, you know, a variety from both libraries for $10 a month. Trio basic is the same, but it also includes ESPN plus content, not all of it, but, you know, a fair amount for $13 a month. Then Trio premiums got this might, you know, be sort of what you're looking for. If you're looking for something that's commercial free, it's ad free for all but sports. They're still going to put ads on sports. Plus, you have the option to download content ahead of time and be able to watch it offline. You know, none of this stuff is, is bad news. But yeah, like you were saying, if, if you're a, if you're a Disney Plus subscriber and you're like, I just like this, I don't, I don't want to change my subscription. It sounds like at least according to Bob Iger, they're not taking that away, not right now. I have to assume that the company is like, let's give people every option they possibly could have that they need to pay for. And then we figure out down the road what we drop later. Well, I think part of it is also, hey, let's not rock the boat. Like, let's not make people mad when, you know, even if you take out Disney hot start, they're losing subscribers in two of their biggest markets, the US and Canada. So let's not rock the boat and take away things. We all know consumers don't like when we take away things. But, you know, we can see like clearly, like a lot of these bundles are ready. If you go to like Hulu.com, they're pushing those bundles extremely hard. That's the first thing you see when you go there. And I'm assuming when this app comes out, that will be the first thing that will go there. What kind of signals to me that it feels like this Hulu acquisition is going to go through is they could have done something that a lot of other places do with like HBO Max or something like that and frame this as we're going to offer Hulu as an add on within the Disney Plus app. And you can choose to add that into your experience if you want it in this one app. But you don't. But to me, the fact that they're saying like, no, no, no, this will be a single app for both of these experiences signal like you don't do that unless it's going to stay like that for a really long time. And for me, that all feels like stickiness, right? Let's put more content into this thing. Technically, you're probably going to save a few bucks. I'm sure when when they launch it at whatever price they launch it at versus getting both of the services separately or maybe at the same price as the basic bundle is right now. And then move and keep that stickiness, right? Because you have this one app that you're used to watching your stuff and oh, it turns out I'm not really watching much Disney or Star Wars stuff. But you know, I'm leaning into this Hulu stuff. To me, this is all about putting up minor speed bumps to be like, all right, so I'm going to have to unsubscribe from the main thing, then I'm going to have to pick up the Hulu subscription separately because they even if they still maintain it, you know, that minor inconvenience of and that's going to cost me like an extra two bucks. All of those speed bumps are like, hey, we we still have properties we have properties that people really like to spend money on and want to engage with across these various apps. But let's put them all together, make it stickier in an age where people are kind of, you know, double checking their subscriptions. I think they might be able to they might be able to successfully rope the two together. And all my concerns will be for not. It just feels like a strange move to go from Disney, which is a very outward facing brand. And Hulu, which is a very internet facing brand going the other direction, bringing them together and saying, hey, what if they're in one app? You want your handmaid's tail? Sweet. Go right over and watch Bluey right after that. It's kind of a weird, weird mix of content. I hope it works out for him. And it makes sense for me as a user to jump over to a single app. I'm all for consolidation when it makes sense. It's just hard to tell at this stage. The other thing to think about, though, is if they start cutting on content spend, right, a lot less noticeable when you have Hulu and Disney together in one app that suddenly there's a lot less content out there. If you're if you're if you're trying to reign in your spending, then it is if you have those discreet. So I think that's part of it as well. There you go. Well, let's talk about gadgets that we can pick apart and make better, Scott. Yeah, heck yeah. Let's talk about Fairphone. You've heard the name before on this show, I'm sure everybody it's known for its modular smartphone designs for easy repair. Well, now Fairphone is doing the same with Fair Buds XL. This is a 240 euro that's what they're going to cost you pair of over ear wireless noise canceling headphones that the company says have the same repairable slash upgradeable design as its phones. They're already available starting today in European markets. So Rich, let's talk about this. How do these headphones compare to others right now? I think pretty good. Here's the specs that we got from Fairphone. The Fair Buds XL how we'll have 26 hours of battery life with active noise cancellation. This is big for these over the ear headphones. The idea is you're going to be traveling with them. So look at 30 hours without there also have some water and dust resistance IP 54 rated. And there's a little like they say a joystick. It really looks more like I don't know a control nub kind of on the right ear to kind of title through settings and stuff like that. It'll have a USB C port. There is no like hard wire audio connection, but you can do audio out through the USB C and Fairphone will sell you a USB C to 3.5 millimeter cable. If you want to go wired for your sound, but the big news, of course, repair ability kind of hard to come by when we're looking at headphones. The Verge actually reached out to a couple of different headphone manufacturers talking to Bowers and Wilkins and Bose about battery swap ability. But both said their headphone batteries weren't replaceable. Then neither Sony or Apple officially responded to the Verge's inquiries. Apple advertises $79 for an out of warranty battery repair on the AirPods Max. So definitely possible with the headset, but it seemed like most manufacturers just wanted to either give you a new pair if the battery dies while it's on warranty or give you a discount if it's out of warranty. But Sarah, the big question is how will this repair ability stuff work with headphones? Yeah. So Fairphone sells headphone replacement parts on its own website like batteries, ear cushions, headband components. Again, these are over the ear headphones that we're talking about here. Most of what's swappable in the Fairbuds XL is within two main speaker units. The company offers a two-year warranty that covers manufacturer defects like if you have a faulty USB-C charging port or a battery that's junk. With the idea that replacement components can be sent to users for them to install themselves. And then Fairphone will reuse recycled discarded parts that, for example, if I take out a battery, send it back to the company, Fairphone says, we'll take care of it for you. So Scott, does the right to repair crowds, which, you know, that's a crowd, feel like the right market for headphones specifically? Well, maybe more so than I've always been skeptical of the phone side of it because to me it's a jack of all trades master of none problem where all the components are, it's cool that you can swap them out. But how is the full experience? And I used to kind of have this problem with smartphones in general in the early days, but those are all, you know, kind of what they are now. And so who knows, maybe that kind of thing will improve with phones over time. But when it comes to accessories like headphones, or really, I could think of a lot of these keyboards, mice, different kinds of peripherals, this makes a lot of sense. I just replaced a pair of headphone pads on the outside of not these, but a different headset. And they were third-party and they didn't quite fit right. They claimed they did. They're weirdly patty and fuzzy and kind of just not the same. And they also got rid of the L and the R inside so I could tell which one was supposed to be for which year. Maybe that's why they don't fit right because you got them backwards. Yeah, that's a weird feeling to not really know. But so that's not the best experience, even with those kinds of replacements. This is a much more interesting concept. Really, all it matters here, if they can get the price right and if the sound is on par with the best thing, those are, can't they even know the brand? Any other brand with their great noise-isolating phones? If they can sound as good as those headphones and offer this kind of interoperability and repairability, then I think this actually could be a real home run. And I think it's actually the way you eventually get people to buy more of their phones as you prove this out with these smaller examples. But I think this is such an easier sell than the phone because a phone is such, it's a part of your work life. It's part of like so many different aspects of your life. And there's a direct comparison, right? Like you had your old phone, you'll play with someone else's phone, you'll see like, I'm using an older processor, it has less RAM, this phone is less responsive, the camera is like marketed, like a lot of compromises a lot of time come with a lot of these modular phones. Whereas headphones, audio is so subjective, really the noise cancellation just needs to be good enough for the flight, right? This is what this, these pair of headphones are kind of trying to hit at is that classic Bose, you know, quiet comfort over the ear. I just want the plain noise to get drowned out in the background. And that's actually where the modularity I think comes in handy, because you have something that the road warriors are going to have these in their bag, right? They're going to get knocked around a lot. There's a lot more chance that stuff gets beat up. And oh, turns out I can just swap out the headband or something like some that's like kind of really hard to do like on these Sony cans and stuff like that. You can, I could see this being very popular with road warriors if they can again, you know, make sure it just meets a bare amount of functionality of it needs to connect really well, the noise cancellation be good enough, audio is subjective enough, as long as it's not garbage. And it seems like the way I would I'm assuming it wouldn't be garbage that that makes a very compelling case. I feel like and the price is in the ballpark of a lot of these like noise canceling over the ear headphones. Yeah, I mean, I really haven't, you know, of of the variety of wireless earbuds, and they've really been buds, not over the ear headphones that I've had in the past, haven't had a whole big issue, but they're also relatively new. You know, that my my my Sony monitor headphones that I use for kind of everything this show included, they definitely need new ear pads to, you know, to your points got every now and then. And yeah, it's not super heard, but I'm not really replacing components. Right. The, you know, if for some reason something within, you know, a noise canceling feature, which the headphones I'm wearing right now don't have. So it's a moot issue. But if that was something that was not that hard for me to do and just save me the trouble of, you know, shipping something back and forth and perhaps spending more money, we're going to a third party vendor where I'm not even getting what I thought I was getting, you know, I think, I think, you know, Fairphone knows that it has a very specific built in audience here. If, if the sort of goodwill to your consumer base ends up being something that other companies adopt in the future, then I think that's where it gets interesting. Yeah. Fair enough, I would say. See what you did there. Speaking of fair or not fair, sometimes news breaks during our show. We just wanted to mention that Elon Musk just tweeted, he has hired a new CEO for Twitter, who's going to take the reins in the coming weeks. Now, if you'd like to share and discuss breaking news, just like GJ Stengel did in our discord, you can join our discord by linking to your Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Well, we have seen a surge in Windows based handheld gaming devices. And the big one that caught a lot of people's attention was the ASUS rogue ally. And it's now available for preorder. The reviews are also out for it and been checking those out. It sells for $700 and shipping June 13th, while a less powerful model will be available for order later this year for $600. The ally out specs Valve's Steam Deck pretty much across the board when you're looking at processor screen and that kind of stuff. But Scott, as a Steam Deck owner, how does this appear to stack up for maybe some of your pain points with the console? Well, this is actually pretty cool. It's also a really good competition in this space. There hasn't been a lot like everything that's sort of come in the wake or even prior to the Steam Deck's release has been a little bit underwhelming. This one is at least welcoming. And the device itself, while you mentioned the specs are better kind of across the board, they're incrementally better. They're not like massive. That's the one thing I kind of wish. And some of the reviewers are reflecting this, the version Sean Hollister, for example, says the ally still doesn't match the Steam Deck's combo of battery life, portability, and price. I would agree with that. I have not had my hands on one yet. The one place where I do know it's going to be kind of awesome is in its performance. Also being a Windows based device, that means that, you know, with the way that Steam Deck works with Proton to make Windows games work on the device, it can be a little squirrely, especially if you're older games and the developers haven't gone through the work to make it ready and all that. So there's some issues there, not many, but some. This won't have those. If your game runs on Windows, it will run on this device with reasonable settings, maybe not maximum, but that's also true of the Steam Deck. You can't run a lot of things on maximum settings. I think this is positioned quite well, especially coming from a company like Asus, who knows the gaming market, the ROG, or ROG, some people say ROG. Their line of products are well regarded in gaming circles, their notebooks, all that sort of thing. So this is a brand people like and trust. So my suspicion is this will actually appeal to a slightly more hardcore version of a potential Steam Deck owner, somebody who wants to get maximum Windows compatibility, which is going to make things like running good old games or running games off the Epic Store, or all the many other various places you may have picked up your video games over time. Those are going to play kind of ready to go out of the box. No questions asked. Steam has a little bit more of a mixed bag when it comes to that. Do I want one? I wish the price was a little lower. I think 700 bucks is sort of a minimum is a little on the high side. I kind of wish they had a range there. That being said, it's only, I think, 50 more than I paid for the maxed out Steam Deck I got. So I don't know why that's a problem for me. I think I'm more thinking about just its general adoptability. But overall, my big take is this is very good for the space. And I'll bet we see more of this. The Steam Deck is kind of a hands down success in every possible way. And their follow up will be interesting as well. They've already come out and said, look, we're not doing one every year like a phone where you feel like you have to go out and get the latest version that made a lot of gamers happy. But I have a feeling it made some of their competitors water at the mouth and think, well, maybe we'll do that. And maybe we'll be quick about our updates and really bogged down the market on this. But I think overall it's good. And I'm very excited to get my hands on one and actually try it and see if it stacks up. So let me ask you, one of the things that we saw kind of across the reviews that we saw, like I said, Sean Hollister, PC Mags Matthew Buzzy and Sherry Smith from Laptop Mag. That was just perusing what we were going through prepping for the show. They all mentioned battery life not as good as the Steam Deck. Some were saying around three and a half, four hours when you're kind of in the middle performance tier, but it can go down to like an hour if you're in the max turbo mode where you really want to get the best quality. In terms of how you use a Steam Deck, is going from something like seven hours on a Steam Deck to four, how much does that matter, I guess, to you? Or is this a sit back couch thing where you're always by a charger anyway or using this on the go? It depends. I had a couple of trips here recently and on those trips I took the Steam Deck and I appreciated its ability to run a lot longer, depending on what you throw at it. If I'm running a game that's got a lot happening, pushing a lot of polygons and a whole bunch of shaders and it's just like a big AAA experience, I'm expecting to get about three hours out of that experience, unless I turn on half pixels. There's some other options you can do on the device we don't have to get into here. But on games that are a little bit more, maybe in the indie space, they can still be 3D, but they're not sort of top tier in terms of pushing the hardware. Both games, I can get five, six hours out of it. In some cases, like some pixelized indie roguelike or something, I can play that game for like sometimes eight or 10, depending on the game. Your mileage may differ, but it does sound like comparatively this device is not going to do that. The other thing to really shed light on here is this will be a device that can and will play Steam games. It will load Steam. You'll run Steam in big picture mode, which is essentially the interface that's already on the Steam Deck, and you'll run your Steam games. It'll feel like a Steam Deck in many ways, but there is something nice about the Steam Deck's integration with the ecosystem that makes that a great experience if you're in that ecosystem. A lot of gamers aren't. A lot of people are like, I don't want to be tied to Steam or Epic or anyone else. I want to have my games just loose on my hard drive, and I want to install them the way I want to. That's always an option for most games still. Those people are going to be stoked about this, and that screen looks nice. There are a lot of good things to say, but to answer your question more succinctly, I think that battery life does matter, and that will make a difference in the long run. So slimness is nice, battery life is nicer. Well, while you're enjoying battery life, maybe you're, I don't know, watching a television that runs on a battery. I don't know, but if you're not familiar with the long running TV series Antiques Roadshow, you might be asking yourself, where is she going with this? The premise is that people who think they might have rare and expensive antique items bring them onto the show, have them appraised, and you get mixed results. Not a lot of tech. It's usually, you know, old chests of drawers or a doll or a painting. But a recent guest brought a binder containing all 102 original base set Pokemon cards, and the appraiser knew exactly how valuable they were. The backstory is that the owner's mom bought the full base set of cards as a gift for her son back in 1999 for $35. Appraiser Travis Landry, who, you know, got handed to Travis, knew an impressive amount of information about Pokemon, said that today the Pokemon card market is really volatile. A lot of it has to do with the fact that things went up in value when people were home, maybe trading more cards in general, you know, pandemic era. So he said the set could have sold for as much as $15,000 a couple of years ago when Pokemon trading was at a peak, but the binder is still worth anywhere from, even by conservative sense, $500 to $10,000. That is a pretty good ROI. That is a good ROI, and the person who owns that is going to need it because millennials. I'm one of you. I have to inform you now. Your childhood now constitutes as antiques. That's right. I know. I'm sorry. Your knees are hurting. Your neck hurts today. It's a bleak future, but at least you may have some savings and some extensive Pokemon collections. It's like how I feel when I listen to a classic rock station where I'm like, oh, so 90s. Yeah, when someone tells you classic gaming is now 2003's GameCube Mario card or something. None of that. None of that feels right. It feels very weird to say it. All right, Rich, let's check out what's in the mailbag today. Well, we got a message from Adam in San Diego, and he was talking about the pixel tablet. We were talking about it now. It's at Google I.O. after some extensive leaking news. He was saying, I was really looking forward to using the new pixel tablet as a home hub when it was on the dock and as a tablet when it wasn't. The fact that it can't do this was not only surprising, but extremely disappointing. This was a total deal breaker for me, so I didn't order it. And there was an article in Ars Technica from Ron Amadio saying that Google's pixel tablet looks just like a smart display, so why isn't it one? So you are not alone, Adam. The one thing I will say, so I did some research on this, there's some workarounds we can do. Google Photos has a background memories wallpaper you could set, so if you want that photo frame kind of feel to it, you could have that on your lock screen. There are lock screen widgets, so if you want your calendar when you look at it. But I get it. I have a Google Hub. I enjoy using it. I enjoy that it's a very passive experience, and I feel like Android is just going to be tinkering with it when it's on the dock, and that's not what you want. I get it, Adam. Yeah. I encourage everybody to look at the Ars Technica article, which really does lay out like, okay, this looks like a Google Nest hub, and does a lot of the things that it's supposed to do except that it's not a smart display for kind of no good reason. They look really similar product-wise, at least on the outside. Yeah. It's a little baffling. One thing though not baffling is my thanks to Scott Johnson, though, for being on the show. It makes total sense to me why I'd be thankful. He brought the fire. He brought the heat. He brought the great take. Scott, where can people find more of your great stuff if they're so inclined? Well, I'm shocked by this turn of events. I'm going to tell fine folks at home that, well, first of all, huge thanks. I know there have been some BTNS folks that went out first week and supported my new Kickstarter for my tabletop game called Dungeon Murder at DungeonMurder.com. If you go to DungeonMurder.com, it should take you directly to the Kickstarter, which is still running for another week and a half, two weeks. We blew through our goals, but we have stretch goals to meet, and I'm very excited about a couple of those. So, if you like a great game for one to five people, eight years and up, who can just sit and have a great time on a Friday night, boy, if I got good news for you, check it out at DungeonMurder.com. Don't do it. Do it now. Or in a few minutes when we're done here. Before we're done, though, we want to extend a special thanks to JCCIM, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, JCCIM. Big round of applause. And by the way, Tom has mentioned this a couple times in earlier shows if you've been listening, but just a reminder, money might be a little tight right now. We get it. So, you can consider joining our Patreon for free. Scroll past the paid options at patreon.com slash DTNS, and you get things like monthly updates, Rodgers column, and the Friday GDI, which is always a fun GDI. And remember patrons, stick around for good day. Internets, our extended show, will be going over Teenage Engineering's new field recorder. I know, hold your excitement. It looks super cool. It's also pricey as heck. We'll bring it all down. Oh, it's good stuff, though. Don't miss it. Hopefully, you'll stay with us. But just a reminder that DTNS is live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with that fun Friday GDI we talked about. Plus, Chris Ashley will be with us for the whole time. We're talking tech and we're playing quizzes. Talk to you then.