 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you, the listener! Thanks to all of you, including Irwin Stir, Ken Hayes, Phillip Shane, and new patrons, Polly, Rodney, and Eva! Welcome them in! Polly, Rodney, Eva! On this episode of DTNS, Adobe brings AI chops to video editing, Apple kicks out a game emulator a week after letting it in, and why Samsung and Apple are looking a little like Nokia and BlackBerry these days. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 15th, 2024. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From the Atlanta area, I'm Nika Monkwardt. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. It is a wonderful Monday here in the United States of America, where millions of people are filing their taxes. The rest of you out there, I hope you have a pleasant you don't have to file your taxes day. Let's start today's show with the quick hits. OpenAI is opening an office in Tokyo and announced plans for a version of GPT-4 to be optimized for the Japanese language. It already works with Japanese, but, you know, they can make some tweaks to make it work perfectly with Japanese. The office will be led by Amazon's former cloud computing lead in Japan, Tadao Nagasaki. OpenAI opened its first international office in London last year, followed pretty quickly by a European Union office in Dublin. And so if you add in San Francisco, the home headquarters, Tokyo becomes its fourth location. Microsoft has resolved a problem that prevented Windows 11 from working on systems with Intel smart sound technology on Intel's 11th gen processors. Intel released audio drivers that fixed the problems almost two years ago, but they were just added to Windows Update this past weekend. After updating the driver, the Windows 11 upgrade should be available within about 48 hours. I don't know what took Microsoft so long to get them in there, but good to know. Remember last week when we told you OpenTable was going to reveal the first names and profile pictures of all reviewers, including past reviews? Remember how we said that wasn't real cool to reveal past reviewers since they didn't know that's what they were signing up for? Well, OpenTable agrees with us, and it has changed its policy. It will show first names and profiles only on new reviews starting May 22, but the old reviews will stay as is. The Turkish Competition Authority issued a temporary injunction against Meta for linking threads and Instagram data without user opt-in. Meta announced that it will shut down threads in Turkey temporarily starting April 29 while it works on a solution. Turkish threads users can delete or deactivate their profiles until the service resumes. It's going to come back. I just don't know how long, right? The Verge has seen a list of specs for the upcoming Sony PS5 Pro. Its sources say Sony is giving the specs to developers so they can make sure their games are compatible with the new console if they want. Sony is apparently encouraging them to take advantage of things like improved ray tracing. Developers can use a PS5 Pro enhanced label if they provide enough enhancements. The Pro will have an improved GPU capable of higher resolutions, frame rates, and the advanced ray tracing. The CPU will be capable of some higher clock speeds, so a little bit faster. Verge says developers can order test kits now, and Sony expects PS5 Pro enhanced games to be certified by August. So that certainly sets the table for a holiday release of a new version of the console. And the existing PS5 model is supposed to continue to be available as well. Adobe is working on integrating generative models for Adobe Premiere. That's its video editor. That would include Adobe's own Firefly Tools along with integrations from PicaLabs, Runway, and OpenAI's Sora. Video editors using Premiere would be able to add and remove objects with just a text prompt. So, you know, take Tom out of Daily Tech News Show and I'd disappear. Premiere would be able to add and remove objects with the text prompt similar to Photoshop's generative fill feature. And Pica might be used to extend shots while Sora and Runway can generate B-roll. Content credentials will let creators watermark these so people can see which models they used. No idea when we'll get these though. Adobe said this year but did not announce a beta. In Adobe News, you can take advantage and you can now subscribe to Adobe's Acrobat AI Assistant for just about $4.99 a month. Not too much. It can answer questions about PDF and other documents, finding specific info, creating summaries, or even creating citations. You can try it out for free on mobile and beta. Adobe plans to bring extensions to it for Chrome and Edge browsers. Who would have thought you'd have a compelling reason to subscribe to Acrobat in this day and age? Usually that's something that people are like, oh, I forgot I subscribed to Acrobat 12 years ago. But the video editing is interesting. It is something that I think would bring more people over to Premiere, at least to try it out. And Roger, I know you do some video editing for us for Top 5 and other things you've been doing video editing for a long time. Do you see these as the features you would want to use? It depends on how they actually work out in real life, in IRL. There's three things that really I think would help. One is some AI scaling features. So you could take a low res video clip, say if something you shot 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And you want it to look as good or maybe not on par, but enough so it's not jarting when you shift to it in a video sequence. The other one is creating any kind of stock image, whether it's a graph or some sort of chart or something. And you don't necessarily want to go into, okay, I got to go and excel, now I got to punch all these figures. You just say, I want a pie chart that shows 68% of Americans prefer pie. And then the other 42% prefer cake. And then just have that so I can throw it in. If you think about all the YouTube explainer videos, often times they use tools that allow them some sort of expeditious process to get it done. Which is why like CG Gray or whatever you use, very simplistic graphics because they're very easy to produce and put out. You could get it so it's a little less threadbare and a little more polished. That would be awesome. Like I need a pie chart or I need a Roman gladiator hacking away at a lion. Because you're talking about gladiatorial games and some sort of Roman history less. I guess I'm talking about Rome. Yeah, there you go. Look at you bringing it up. It's Roger. Roger's the one who thinks about it more often in this group. So, so Nika, I know you do a bunch of video editing as well. It's interesting. Willie Scott pointed out in our chat room that, you know, Sora Pika Labs runway, those could be integrated into other video editors as well. That's not unique to Adobe. It's Firefly. That would be the separating factor. But do any of these sound like things you would like to mess around with? So it we I do some editing for my podcast and I haven't used Adobe Premiere in years. I've had fundamental issues with Adobe's kind of cloud, you know, base system that they moved into. But this does pose some interesting options when it comes to video editing because we know everybody is trying to find ways to cut down time to get content rolled out because it's all about how fast and how efficient you can get your content, you know, turned around. So some of these things are fairly interesting. My thing is, especially when it comes to AI, we need to be creating, you know, AI tools that actually improve the user's experience is actually beneficial. It's not just something to say, oh, we kind of came up with this. This is kind of cool. What is actually going to make video editors lives easier? Similar to what Roger was just saying, if you can text edit to create a graph or a graphic that you need to go along with what you are presenting. Then that takes out a significant amount of time that you would have to do to go and actually create or actually search for that particular piece or that particular graphic that you want to throw in your video. So it I think it it has some potential. It's just getting people to to leave something like a final cut to go over to Adobe Premiere. Yeah, it's interesting to me, a lot of the talk around Sora open ai's was, you know, oh, is it going to replace filmmakers? And what we're seeing here is an example of using it to create B roll. And I think that that's that's bringing the expectation back down to earth, right and saying, yeah, sure, I guess so is pretty impressive. But what it's going to be best at is something pretty simple, like, you know, show me a city street in New York with cars driving by, because I just want to show some B roll of that. That's useful. That's something as a video editor. I could I could I can say we'll speed things up, obviously extending a shot to say like, oh, we, you know, we ran out of room and I want to have some I have some sound that needs to have a little more of this. Can you just make it work for another second? These are all useful. I don't know how often we need to add or remove objects from video. I mean, I guess maybe because we haven't had an easy way to do it before we didn't use it a lot. But I I don't run into that with even still photos as often. So I don't know about video. Yeah, it's very interesting, you know, the things that they are are putting into this. Let's put some things in there that are actually going to make creators lives a little bit easier. And I could be wrong. There could be people say, Hey, I asked for this all the time. I need it all the time. Let us know. Oh, yeah, for sure. Feedback of daily technician.com. Apple made a big change of policy. We talked about it previously, allowing emulators, game emulators into the Apple App Store. They said you're going to have to, you know, you can't be violating copyrights. You can only distribute games you have the rights to and all of that. But they said, we're going to allow you to do this. We're going to allow you to have a game store in your emulator and all of that. The fact that you had to abide by copyright rules and only provide your own ROMs may have tripped up the first emulator to get the boot. It was approved. It went into the app store. It was called IGBA, a Game Boy emulator. It allowed you to go on the web, download ROMs and put them in the emulator. That could have been a problem. You know, if they weren't policing where those those ROMs came from. But Apple said it violated guidelines on spam and copyright, which it usually does not taking a it doesn't it doesn't give details. It took a, you know what you did approach the IGBA emulator appeared to be a source copy of GBA for iOS, which is an open source app, but they didn't just take the underlying code. They basically copied GBA for iOS without permission and then spammed a bunch of ads on it. So Apple told Mac rumors that in fact they removed the app because it was just a copy of GBA for iOS's submission and not an original app and the ads were the spam part of this. Nika, it's the first test case of this, but it really doesn't give us any clarity on whether ROMs, how you get your ROMs to put in these emulators are going to trip people up or not. It seems pretty clear cut that this was violating the app store policy by just ripping off someone else's submission. The question is, why did it get through app review in the first place? And that is the question. How did it get through the app review process? Apple is typically pretty stringent on what it allows into his app store and what it does not. And the fact that something this blatant made it in and people were actually using it. To me, it signals that either someone dropped the ball in the app review process or it just was quote unquote that good that it made it through, which I don't think is allowed. I think it's a former. It just goes to show that Apple can be fallible and they are probably going to have to put some extra steps in the app review process for specific cases like this to ensure that they are not basically just copying and pasting someone else's, you know, code in this to to invent to add ads on top of it. It's kind of a slap in the face kind of both ways. So there's definitely, I think, going to have to be some additional governance around what they're allowing into the app store, specifically as contained as it pertains to emulators. Weird Ami in our chat suggests that stuff reviewed after lunch by Apple may get through with less scrutiny. It's a good reminder that these are humans doing this and you have a lot of apps to review. Not there's not one person reviewing all of them. So it's possible that someone looked at IGBA and did not realize that it was a duplicate of GBA for iOS. There ought to be some automated ways, I would think, to flag those sorts of things for human review to say, hey, these apps look a lot similar. Can you take a look and make sure they're not? In this case, it seems like just public outcry because the developer of GBA for iOS went online and was like, well, thank goodness for Apple review, somebody's ripping off my stuff. Now, in the end, Apple review did pull it out. And so, you know, he got what he asked for, but it took some complaining online for that to happen. Yeah, absolutely. And that's not the way the policy should work, is it? I shouldn't let it through and then say, oopsies, let me take it out. It should have never happened in the first place. It is also still hanging out there. Are we going to have problems with ROMs? Because if anybody doesn't realize what we're meeting with ROMs, ROM stands for read-only memory. And it's a shortcut for talking about games that are on cartridge. So in a Game Boy, for example, you have the little cartridge, you stick in the Game Boy, and it has read-only memory of the game. You can copy that memory and make a virtual cartridge out of it, and then you can use the virtual file to play in the emulator, right? So that's what the emulator is doing. The emulator is a software version of the Game Boy, and then the ROM is a software version of the cartridge. And so the whole controversy around emulators is if you don't own the copyright to the ROM, you can't just make copies of those without permission. Do you have anything to play on the emulator? And there's a lot of homebrew stuff that people do, but there's also a lot of wink-wink stuff, right, where an emulator says, yeah, we've got our own ROMs, but also you can use it if you find them somewhere else, right? And there's a difference when it comes to kind of doing it on the side, so to speak, but when you're putting a whole app in the App Store that gives a different context to it, it's not just something siloed that someone is doing in their free time on, you know, for fun or something they're just trying out at home. You're actually creating what you're calling a new app. You have a whole name, you're putting ads on it, and you're putting it in the App Store where people can download it. I think that's probably the biggest delineation between that is how are you using it for profit, so to speak, and not for profit. And that's where it comes into play to me, is you're actually taking this code that has been submitted by someone else, that's owned by someone else, that was created by someone else, and you're putting it in the App Store under your banner saying that it's yours. Yeah. And honestly, this is the least controversial kick-out of an emulator that you could have expected. You know, somebody who literally took open-source code, so it was easy to make the code, copied the interface, so they're not doing anything defensible there, and then spamming it with ads. I mean, I don't think too many people are going to dispute that this should have gotten kicked out. I think a lot of people expected the first emulator to get kicked out would have been kicked out over a different kind of copyright violation, over you are enabling people to get ROMs that they don't have the rights to. And that may still happen, but that's not what happened this time. Nope. Well, folks, if you have thoughts about this or anything else, you might want to go and check out our Discord where you can chat with other members of the audience. We've got all kinds of channels in there, from hardware to science to food, Apple, Microsoft, Google, all the things you might expect. You can join our Discord by linking your Patreon account. Become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. It was big news in January when it turned out that Apple had replaced Samsung as the top worldwide shipper of smartphones in 2023. It was the first time Samsung had topped the list since 2010. Now, Samsung is off to a good start to take that back this year. IDC's Q1 estimates for 2024 show Samsung topping the chart again with 20.8% market share worldwide, followed by Apple with 17.3%. Both of those are a decline in market share, but Samsung's is almost flat. It dropped 0.7%. Not much. Apple fell 9.6%. Xiaomi stayed third while Tranzen jumped up to fourth place and knocked Oppo, which makes one plus, back to fourth. IDC notes that overall smartphone shipments were up worldwide from last year. So even though we had a couple of these folks like Apple experienced declines, shipments were generally up 7.8%. The third consecutive quarter of shipment growth. Xiaomi rose its market share 33.8% and Tranzen, whose strongest market is several places in Africa, rose 84.9%. Average selling price also increased. You may look at this and go, oh, well, it's Tranzen, so it must be people saving money. Selling price increased, indicating customers are opting for more expensive phones that they intend to hold on to longer. Nika, there's been a growing sentiment that iPhone is stale. That doesn't help, but Apple's top spot was boosted by Chinese sales, which have slowed for everybody. Do you think this means Apple needs to get better at sales outside of the US, Europe and China? I think it's a, it's a layered issue for one, people are keeping their devices longer. People have some economic anxiety and it's like, hey, if it's not broke, let's leave it. And honestly, the last few iPhones have been nominal changes. And what that means is if you have an older iPhone upgrading to one of the new ones is, wow, this is a big boost. But if you're going from year to year, if you change every year, you're not seeing a huge difference in the actual, you know, phone itself, the hardware, the design itself, I think where Apple has been spending a lot of their time lately is around the software. They are definitely making significant changes to the iOS and what the phone can actually do, not necessarily so much to what it looks like. And I just think again, as you mentioned, you have to expand your footprint. If you're only focusing on three markets, sure, you know, you're leaving out a bunch of people and a bunch of people who have money to spend on smartphones. So I think it's one of those things where you have to take a look at it at a couple different places. If you have a market that is, you know, consistent, they're going to support you, but your product is good and they don't really see a need to change or to buy something new, people are keeping their products longer. And it's one of those things where if you want to move with the time, you're going to have to expand, you know, your sales environment, your whole marketing presentation to keep customers and to gain new customers. That's to me, that's really kind of the only way to ensure that you're staying competitive. Yeah. It's fascinating to compare Oppo and Apple tracking here. So it's one thing to say, oh, it's Apple being too restrictive or it's Apple doing this or Apple not having a medium range or a high medium range phone. But Oppo had almost the exact same experience as Apple did. A slight decline in shipments and an almost identical year-over-year change. Apple fell 9.6% on the year, Oppo fell 8.5%. So it makes me want to look at those two specifically and say, what are the similarities between Apple's strategy and Oppo's strategy? And there's not a lot of similarities other than the OnePlus isn't as widely available worldwide. The Apple iPhone is certainly widely available worldwide, but it's not marketed like you were just saying in all the places that Apple might benefit. So it does seem to me that this indicates not that it's too late, but Apple is going to have to diversify beyond just China. Like they need China. China's a huge market and they're doing the right things to try to bolster sales in China. They need to do more to bolster sales in India and they need to have a strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, Latin America as well because they need those markets. That's where Trangin, which I've been watching for a long time, Trangin sells budget phones, mid-range phones. They've dominated most of the African markets. They're huge in Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia as well. So I feel like, you know, you look at it, Trangin jumping 84.9%. That tells you something. That's huge. Right? Yeah. And the thing is, Apple does have, you know, non-pro line phones. So you're pro and you're pro max. They do have, if you want to call it, an entry-level iPhone. They do have that option. And I think a lot of Apple's focus, particularly the last year, iPhone we know is the flagship device of Apple. But they have the new chips, the new M's, the Apple Silicon chips. They really put a lot of effort into Apple Vision Pro. So I think some of the marketing has been skewed towards some of the different products. And, you know, iPhone, it's the standard. It's, you know, it's always going to sell. And I think that may have played into this little bit that they maybe took their eye off the iPhone ball a little bit to put focus on some of the other hardware products. And I think it's potentially showing now that that shift in focus did have an effect on the flagship device. Yeah. Keep your eye on the phone, Apple. That's kind of what you're saying. Yeah. The other thing, before we move off of this, I think it's worth pointing out is that Trenchin didn't just do this overnight. Trenchin has been slowly building up local operations, employing local people, doing local marketing in multiple markets. So they are marketing specifically to the people in those regions. I think Apple, just in a lot of places, relies on its worldwide profile of like, oh, it's the iPhone, right? It may indicate they need to do a little more localization, a little more on the ground work to, you know, be able to pitch the iPhone for people in Kenya, people in Ecuador, people in Vietnam better than they do right now because those are different markets with, you know, different quirks and different sensibilities. And I know we always say Apple is a juggernaut. It's so huge. It's so large. But as you mentioned at the top of the show, is it becoming, you know, you got to keep your eyes a very slippery slope if we think back to Nokia, Blackberry, how popular they were when the iPhone was coming out with people like, oh, this iPhone, whatever this thing is, can't possibly compete with Nokia and Blackberry. I mean, it's a very slippery slope. And if you kind of take, like you said, your eye off the iPhone, then, you know, it could get a little bit hairy in there if you aren't very strategic with your marketing of your devices. I read this sentence in the IDC report. While the top two players both saw negative growth in the first quarter, it seems Samsung is in a stronger position overall than they were in recent quarters. I mean, just put Nokia in the place of Samsung. And I bet you can find a similar line in an IDC report from, you know, 2011, 2010, something like that, maybe even earlier. So I am not saying that Samsung and Apple are in exactly the same position as Nokia and Blackberry. There's certainly no equivalent for the iPhone coming up at this point. But it struck me. It struck me, Nika, as somewhat similar of like, oh yeah, Nokia and Blackberry. They've got a big lead. They don't have anything to worry about. And you know what? A dark horse is coming in. Yeah, don't get too comfortable. Be careful. Exactly. All right, let's check the mailbag. Brian heard us talking about deepfakes and rules about deepfakes and a proposed law from the U.S. Congress about, you know, making it easier to sue and bring a civil action over deepfakes. And Brian asked, are deepfakes protected speech or are they libel slash slander? Obviously, there's a question of intent. If you are trying to present a deepfake as truth and harm someone's reputation, it's probably not protected speech. That is the question. Brian is asking the question that the courts are going to weigh in on, which is if I just do a deepfake and I say, I'm not trying to harm anyone's reputation. It's a parody or something. It's fairly defensible. If, however, you can show like, oh, this person was trying to ruin my reputation, which is, you know, the ones that are intimate depictions and things like that, they're subject of that law that we talked about last week, then it becomes easier to say, I don't think they were trying, you know, I don't think this was done with good intentions and it is harming my reputation because it's not true. But also, a deepfake is never true, right? So is it something where people would think it's true and then does it fall under slander? And I'm not going to try to answer these right now, Nika, because it's a thorny issue and you do need the courts to weigh in on it. Absolutely. And it's one of those things where it's better to get ahead of this than to be lagging behind because it could potentially have huge repercussions, whether it be on an individual or a company. It's, like you said, it's very thorny, but it's a very present issue that needs to be addressed. And that question that Brian asked, is the question that I was getting to when I said, do we have existing laws that can address this? Because on the one hand, if you can clearly show, okay, this person was trying to get revenge on me, they put my head on this fake picture and made it look like I was doing something embarrassing. You could probably get a judge to say, okay, that shouldn't be allowed, but are there damages? And then that's where that law came in, is to say, you know what, we're going to make it so there are damages. It won't just be up to a judge or a jury to decide the damages. We're going to put a minimum that's pretty hefty on that. Yep. Well, thank you, Nika Monford, for hanging out today. As usual, it's wonderful to talk tech with you. If people want to hear more of your perspectives, where should they go? You can find me at Tech Savideva on all of your social media platforms. You can also head on over to snubwithcast.com, a podcast that I co-host with another contributor of DTNS, Terrence Gaines, where we talk all things Apple and then some. We air every Friday. Wherever you get your podcasts. Go check it out, snub-o-s. And patrons, stick around for the extended show. We're going to carry this conversation on, Good Day Internet. Apparently, according to Tech Crunch, investment in AI companies is falling already. Is the boom over? What does that mean for the tools you're using? Stick around and we will talk about it. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday for PM Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.