 Coming up on DTNS carriers are blocking Apple's private relay feature Google is Twitter shaming Apple for not adopting RCS yet and Tim Stevens is here to give us an update on the state of EVs after this is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday, January 11th, 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Chang. The show is produced and editor at large of CNET's Rhodes show. Tim Stevens is back. Welcome Tim. Hey Tom, it's great to be here. It's good to have you. I do not consider the year begun until our first Tim Stevens guest appearance on Daily Tech news show. We were just talking about that and organizing principles of software as well as tech for the New York Times Crossword that's all on good day internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons today. They include Daniel Dorado, John Atwood and Pat. Let's start with a VTech things you should know. One plus officially announced at 6.7 inch OLED one plus 10 pro phone has a snapdragon gen one chipset and X 65 modem for 5G and adaptive 120 Hertz refresh rate and a 5000 milliamp battery and also 80 watt charging along with 50 watt wireless charging full charge from dead in 32 or 47 minutes. Perspectively no price or release date. However product number two comes from honor. Honor announced a foldable called the magic V with a 6.45 inch external OLED display unfolding to a 7.9 inch tablet OLED display starting at 9999 one approximately US $1500 available in China and on January 18. So yes, this is a China model at least for now. Finally, Microsoft also announced a black matte option for the surface go three with an option for LTE available now starting at $550 US dollars. The Associated Press is going to open a marketplace January 31 in partnership with the company who's Zua spelled X O O A to sell NFTs of photo journalism. These NFTs will be built on the polygon blockchain and support the metamask wallet. The first collection will include photos of space climate war and other images with extensive metadata on where when and by whom the photo was taken. The AP and Zua will get a cut of any reselling of the NFTs. So that's the way NFTs can work. They'll get a 10% stake every time somebody resells it. And the AP says photographers will share in any revenue that it makes from their work. Apple analysts Ming Chi Quo's sources say that Apple's upcoming mixed reality headset will ship with the same 96 watt charger used by the 14 inch MacBook Pro with the 10 CPU core M one pro chip Quo previously reported that the headset would have two processors with one as powerful as an M one. That would explain why the price might be like a MacBook Pro price. Keep an eye on Fox Trot, a digital only food platform that has started not being digital only. It's opening physical convenience stores. They've got them in Dallas, Washington DC and Chicago. Fox Trot offers five minute pickup at those stores or 30 minute delivery in its delivery area as well as shipping some of their non perishable items nationwide focuses on curating local producers and similar to a trader Joe's offering private label products that they feel are of sufficient quality. The difference seems to be that Fox Trot will build its tech in advance of the capacity instead of playing catch up to its growth after it launched an app. Fox Trot plans to open 50 new retail locations over the next two years 25 of them each year. Mozilla's privacy focused data sharing platform rally launched a study called Facebook pixel hunt in partnership with the news publication the markup. The study will look at how Facebook tracks people data it collects and what data reveals about its users Princeton University centers for information technology policy previously used rally for studies on misinformation. The markup is Mozilla's first non academic partner for rally. All right. Let's talk a little more about the Apple Google RCS fight. It's back starting on Saturday when the Wall Street Journal ran an article called why Apple's I message is winning teens dread the green text bubble. Of course the green text bubble they're referring to is how non Apple messages show up in Apple's messaging app. The Android Twitter account then fired up the old public fight about supporting RCS the open standard. If you don't know RCS brings features to all phones like read receipts and multimedia messaging as long as that phone is standards compliant. Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer joined in writing using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this. Now Apple has never actually opposed adding RCS. It just hasn't done it yet. Documents revealed in the epic Apple case however while not related to RCS directly showed that many people inside Apple opposed making its messages service available outside of Apple platforms like Android. Apple's Phil Schiller famously wrote JAWS and I think moving I message to Android will hurt us more than help us. Now those revelations have led a lot of folks to believe there is opposition or at least feet dragging within Apple to implementing RCS for similar reasons. Lockheimer continued the push on Monday writing we're not asking Apple to make I message available on Android. We're asking Apple to support the industry standard for modern messaging RCS in I message just as they support the older SMS MMS standards. Our technic is Ron Amadeo points out that RCS is really old though. It was first begun in 2008 and while it does support typing indicators user presence better image support. It does not support end to end encryption or non phone devices. Google supports those in its implementation of RCS but had to add it in itself in the app. It's not part of RCS itself and Apple does all that stuff already pretty well. So the question works both ways. What motivation other than public pressure from Google is there for Apple to support RCS anyway especially when a big part of the world is using WeChat or WhatsApp anyway. When I read the story this morning I was kind of like are we are we still you know are people still feeling superior if they have a blue bubble versus a green bubble. Certainly not in my circles. If you don't have an iPhone I'm going to know soon enough if we're texting back and forth doesn't matter to me. I know that there are certain things that don't render correctly and that's a minor annoyance but for the most part I feel like everybody's conversing just fine and you can use whatever phone you want with you know with the manufacturer and carrier that you want. But it does make me wonder yeah how long does Apple want to hold out on something like this especially when there is public pressure to say you could make this so much easier for everybody why don't you and Apple's never really given a good answer for that. And I also sort of wonder if Apple isn't working on its own type of thing but that would still be proprietary because it's Apple. Yeah I don't know. They have all the things that are in RCS. They're just proprietary exactly. I'm a green bubble and I am old enough to really not care that I'm a green bubble. So I think that's that's fine. I actually was really surprised to learn how much people really care about being a green bubble or not being a green bubble. So that was quite interesting to me and I love the call out from Lockheimer. I think calling them out for being you know brand based on humanity and equity. I thought that's you know being a little bit overly dramatic but but ultimately yeah I don't see any reason why Apple would really want to do this and as an Android user even if Apple did port messages over there's no way that I would you know leave my current messaging app to to switch over to an Apple based platform just so that I wouldn't be a green bubble on someone else's phone. So I don't really see this changing anytime soon. I don't think there's really any investment from either side of this to make this happen and I think users are just going to be stuck in the middle unfortunately. I believe Apple should support RCS because it's an open standard and carriers that Google has done a good job of getting carriers on board to support it. But I don't think it's the one thing that would bring humanity to Apple either. I think Google is very much overstating the case. Absolutely. And I I'm not even sure what Google gets out of this other than being able to try to make Apple look bad in public like if Apple supported RCS then that's one less reason to use Google. So it's sort of I don't I don't know it's a weird fight. Speaking of Apple, Apple's iOS 15 added a feature called iCloud Private Relay. It's technically in beta and it's off by default. If you haven't gone in to turn it on, you don't have it on. But if you turn it on, it will send your website requests on the Safari browser through a server controlled by Apple and then through a third party. And this is the important part. It decrypts or it encrypts your DNS records. So your network provider and Apple will know your IP address, but not what site you want to visit because that's encrypted. And then the third party does the decrypting of the DNS request. But it only knows the request came from Apple. It doesn't know your IP address. That way, nobody in the chain knows both what site you want and your IP address. And that means mobile carriers among others cannot build up a profile of what sites its customers visit and sell that data to advertisers if they've got private relay on. Well, they don't like that. Monday, Vodafone, Telefonica and T-Mobile signed an open letter voicing their opposition to the rollout writing that private relay will quote impact operators ability to efficiently manage telecommunication networks. They've never objected to VPN on similar grounds, but you know, maybe they're fearing this will happen at a higher level. Some users reported that when they tried to turn on iCloud private relay, they got a message saying their cellular plan did not support it. But it may not be turned off for all customers. T-Mobile told 9 to 5 Mac that quote, customers who choose plans and features with content filtering, like parental controls, do not have access to iCloud private relay so that those services work as designed. All other customers have no restrictions. That makes sense. Now you can accuse T-Mobile of doing it for another reason, but it would make sense if you've got a parental control that needs T-Mobile to see what sites are being visited that you can't have private relay on and have that work. Some customers are saying they don't have parental controls and it's still off, but it's possible those customers don't realize they have the feature or that T-Mobile system is incorrectly applying the restriction. However, I think the carriers doth object too much. Do you? Yeah, I definitely do. I feel like this is kind of the next step of the ye olde net neutrality battle where carriers want to have control over how you see things, you know, what sort of compression is being applied to what sort of content you're consuming and how you're consuming it. And really it would make it difficult for them to have special content partnerships and delivery methods for certain accounts. So I can see why they would be upset about it, but to me, it has nothing to do with improving these experiences. It all comes down to what can they charge it for and how much of a deal can they get on it? Well, and Tom, you're mentioning, you know, well, they don't seem to have a problem with somebody turning on VPN. I mean, that's something that I do fairly regularly, you know, for reasons that I don't need to disclose to everybody else, but security security alone is a good enough reason to turn on a VPN at any point. Exactly. So yeah, for a carrier to be like, well, this is about parental controls that I can see that and I can see where you'd have to work through that in some way. But it does seem a little bit more restrictive without a lot of information to the end user. If the carriers, I understand the carriers objecting and saying we don't like this because it's Apple works at a scale beyond most VPN providers, and that's going to make things harder for us. Fine. That doesn't mean Apple has to change it. If T-Mobile is saying, oh, this is just for people who have things on, make it very clear to the customers of T-Mobile why that is and what they can turn on to make private relay work. If you don't want parental controls, go here, turn it off. That would be the thing that would make me believe T-Mobile in that situation. Well, we are going to talk about EV cars with Tim Stevens in just a moment. But first, a little bit more Apple news. The Korea Communications Commission announced that Apple has submitted plans to let app developers in the country use alternative payment systems. South Korea passed a law back in September. We talked about it on the show, barring apps to our operators from forcing the use of Apple's own in-app payment system for developers. Apple said it will provide an alternative payment system at a reduced service charge in the country. Apple's submission did not indicate a start date for this program, how much the charge for it would be, or what alternative payment systems it would support, but it's at least a step forward, I suppose. Yeah, it's a major step for Apple to be like, yes, we are working with the KCC, we're gonna do this. I am very curious how they implement this because it sounds like there will be two ways to offer payments. One will be through Apple Pay, through the existing system, and the other will be some Apple-administered platform that will allow you to choose from third parties. I would assume in Korea it would be something like Cal Pay or something like that. So then the fight would become, well, which payment platforms get allowed into Apple's alternative payment system? But that Apple could say, well, we can't let every payment system on because some of them aren't above board. But we're not even there yet. We don't even know how this thing is going to work. Tim, do you have any thoughts on this? I'm just wondering if Apple is really going to be pulled, kicking and screaming country by country into allowing this. I mean, we're seeing, I think it was the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago where those announced that things are happening there as well. We're still waiting to find exactly what we do in the US. It seems like Apple should see the writing of the wall and just come up with a better solution for this rather than having to do what it needs to do on a country-by-country basis. And really, like I said, getting dragged, kicking and screaming into the future that seems like is going to be legislated in every country. Alternatively, this is their beta test. They can see if it works in Korea and then roll it out to everyone. Right? That's the optimistic view, for sure. Somebody had to have one. Hey, folks, joining the conversation in our Discord, you can link your Patreon account to it and chat away at patreon.com slash D T N S. Well, CES has wrapped and EVs had a big presence at this year's show where a number of new models were announced. Tim, you are our expert. CES was a little wonky this year, some in-person things, some remote. But what were the notable EV highlights that you took away from the show? Yeah, it was definitely a weird show and it was weird not being there in person. But we saw a lot of big carnivalings. In fact, we we called this the biggest auto show in years, so it was great to see the number of products there. I think that the biggest probably literally and figuratively was the new Chevy Silverado EV. Ford unveiled the F-150 Lightning to a lot of pomp and circumstance last year. So this is time for Chevy to to pick up and show what they're going to do. And the numbers are really impressive. It's a 300 mile range, excuse me, up to a 400 mile range truck. With a starting price, they said of under $40,000. But the problem is that's really only going to be the price. If you run a small business or if you run a large business and you're looking to buy a fleet of these things, the first edition cost truck. If you a consumer want to buy one, you're looking at $105,000 for this truck when it comes out. So they're definitely aiming up market, but they did say that they'll have more and more affordable versions of the truck coming after the initial release, which are expecting some time in that 2023. So a little bit of time to wait there. But again, it's got all the productivity and practicality benefits you'd expect from an EV no longer. Would you have to go rent a generator, for example, if you're working at a job site, just plug all your tools into the truck. So it's pretty exciting stuff. And I'm looking forward to seeing more of that. The car that probably got the most buzz, certainly on the social platforms, was BMW's IX, which was a special edition, a one-off, constant version they showed off, which had e-ink skin. So the same sort of displays that you see on an Amazon Kindle, low power, typically black and white displays, they covered the car with them and it created this amazing trippy effect we've not seen before. Interestingly, BMW swore up and down that this car could do color, but we never saw anything of that effect from the version that was at CES anyway. But they do plan to be able to offer this car with multiple colors. So I don't know if they're actually going to make a production version of this, but a pretty interesting and exciting concept to see anyway. Now, I mean, you were pointing out that that they didn't cover the entire car with the ink, either. There was one notable exception. Yeah, they missed a spot. The fuel door or the charging door, I should say, on the passenger side remains white. So most of the press shots that you see are shot from the left side, the driver side of the car. And if you haven't seen a video of it from the other side, you can note that the fuel door or the charging door remains white all the time. Oops. Other things coming though this year, we've got a lot of great EVs coming in the year ahead. The Hyundai Onyx 5, for example, the Kia EV6, Subaru's got the Solterra coming out. So a lot of great things coming out. This is really if you've been waiting to buy an EV, if you've been eager to get into the emissions free lifestyle. This is a pretty good year to finally jump in if in a big if you can actually find a dealership who can actually get you a car, which is still going to be an issue. You know, Tim, last, I guess it was last summer, I run in Airbnb and there was a car here that I had not seen before. It turned out that it was the VW ID. And I was like, that is a nice looking car. What is this? What what is the buzz? What is new about the buzz? So the ID buzz will be Volkswagen is electric bus. If you remember the van again or the 60s VW a micro bus, those are, you know, iconic vehicles and really beautiful things. And cars that a lot of people have a lot of fond memories of. VW really wants to tap into that. And that's why they created a concept ID buzz about four or five years ago. In fact, I got to drive a concept of that about five years ago. Now they're finally bringing that to production. We don't know any details as far as range or cost or anything like that. But really, they're trying to harken into the styling and kind of that cool vibe of the original micro bus back in the 60s and bringing that to an electric emissions free future. So we're seeing exactly what's going to look like, but they will be doing the unveil on March 9th. They just confirmed that. So we only have about two months to go until we get all the details on this thing. I'm really eager because this is, you know, the ID for which is probably the car that you saw is a really cool car. But it's kind of lacking that that kind of personality, that charm that a lot of the older Volkswagen's have. And I hope that VW can kind of bring that back with the ID buzz. What are your thoughts on for anybody who's looking for a new or used car right now? I'm kind of in the market as well. It's like, wow, prices are skyrocketed. I don't know how I can even play this game. What what does the EV market look like in comparison to the rest of the car market? It's definitely a tough time to buy a car. If you're looking to buy a new car, then you're probably looking at, you know, having to wait, put an order and wait three to six months, something like that and use car prices, as you mentioned, are through the roof. EVs, I think they are still niche enough that they're maybe a little bit easier to get in some ways because they're not quite as in hot demand as a typical camera or Corolla or that kind of thing. So I think there's a little bit of a help there. But they're also the they actually have fewer moving parts and sometimes fewer complex parts in these cars, too, which actually means they're easier to produce in some ways. So we're seeing some supply chain issues that are hitting internal combustion cars actually aren't so bad on EVs for some of them anyway. So you might find a little bit more luck buying an EV. But still there every cars are defined and you're probably looking at a weight and hopefully hopefully not a dealer markup, but we're seeing a lot of those two assembly. Well, I for one am not going to be buying an EV until those prices come down a little more. What's the lowest price do you think someone will be able to pay for an EV within the next year? Normally, I would say that the Chevy Bolt is one of the more affordable ones, but I think they're still on a stop sale, unfortunately, because of a major battery cost. So it's probably the Nissan Leaf, I think, which you can get, I think just under thirty thousand dollars. And that is a nice EV. It definitely has a lot of practicality about it. And it's a good car to drive to. So I think right now that's the most affordable, but Chevy as part of the E3 excuse me, CES festivities, they said there's an Equinox version coming out that's going to be priced at $30,000. So that should be hitting that target as well. I hope. As first reported by Auto Car, Toyota UK wants to increase a vehicle's life cycle for customers with a new sub brand called Kinto. Maybe this is a way I like buying open box stuff at Best Buy. That's kind of what they're doing here. Refurb for cars. When a car finishes its first use cycle, such as a lease term, it would be returned to the factory. So not just return to the dealer in certified pre-owned, this would be remanufactured to quote unquote the best standard and ready for a second cycle with a new driver. Toyota thinks this process could happen more than once before it would have to recycle the car by reusing parts from the vehicles that are still in good condition and rebuilding batteries. Program is initially focusing on Toyota's plant in Berneston, Darby in the UK, which builds the Corolla hatchback and Corolla station wagon. Tim, I wanted to get your take on this because it sounds great in theory of like, oh, lots of reuse and recycling. Is this is this new even or is this marketing? What do you think of this? Yeah, this is definitely something that I'm pretty excited about. Manufacturers have been talking about doing this for years now. It's good to see something finally starting to go. You know, we've had certified pre-owned cars. We call them CPOs for a long time now, where if you basically trade your car in, then the manufacturer does some kind of light refreshing on it and resells it, but this will be far more complicated than that. So we're talking about, you know, probably new tires, potentially replacing seats, you know, maybe even pulling the interior out and replacing things like that. So it's going to be a lot more comprehensive than your typical certified pre-owned, you know, give it a buff of wax and a little bit of paint detailing and send it back in a lot again. The potential here is actually really exciting when we get to a really strong EV based platform, because at that point, because there are so few moving parts that are going to wear out, the core of the car is actually going to last a really long time, probably a lot longer than the battery pack and potentially the motors too. So there's a lot of opportunity there to think about you trading your car after four or five years, they pull the battery pack out and put a new one in and maybe put some new seats in and do some other things to update and refresh it. And sold again as, you know, something between a used car and a new car. You save a lot of things that would otherwise go to a landfill and you have a car that would be more affordable as well. So it certainly would be a really attractive option. And as we're moving into an EV future, I think it's going to be something that quite a bit more of. Do they use a sub brand for that though? Because I feel like everybody's going to be like, oh, Tom, you have a kinto. I see. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I think how they figure out that how to do the marketing around it, I'm sure we'll see a lot of different iterations and attempts. You know, a couple of years ago, it was all about car subscriptions and different companies were trying different things there to see what would work. I think we'll probably see a lot of a lot of playing around here to see what works too. I wouldn't be surprised that there's some different badging on cars like this to differentiate a little bit because they probably do want to encourage people to upsell to a new car. But yeah, I hope that they don't make it too obvious because there's no reason to shame people with a, you know, the equivalent of a green, green bubble on the back of the car. I don't think a kinto would be that at all. I feel like if I was rocking a kinto, people would be like, OK, cool, Sarah, you care about recycling. Yeah, it depends on what part of the country you live in. I'm sure that's true. And how they position it. I mean, if they take the seats out of these cars and maybe replace them with vegan leather or something that's recycled and really make it a strong environmental stance as much as a cost saving stance, then yeah, absolutely, Sarah, I think that would be absolutely right. And I hope that they are able to really position it in that way so that it's not just about saving a couple of bucks at the end of the day, but also, you know, saving something from going in the landfill. Well, if you're driving an EV or a regular old car and you've decided you'd like to go somewhere and you're going to ditch the hotel and do a vacation rental for your next trip, Chris Christensen has a nifty hack for finding the best price. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Here's a hack for travel that I heard recently that can work whether you're actually doing some real travel or whether you're just going to be hiding in an Airbnb. If you find something on Airbnb, for instance, and you're wondering if there's a better price on one of the other hosting platforms because some apartments and houses are up on multiple platforms, take the photos from the listing, download them and use Google image search to see if you can find other places where that same apartment or house is being offered. And it's possible you'll find different fees. So check that out. It's a little hack for you for Airbnb or other hosting services. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. It'll reverse Google image search. That's a real good one, but for trips. It's also good to find out if your place actually exists and isn't just, you know, stock imagery that's being posted in different places. You find it listed in multiple places around the world. Yeah, good sign. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So this was on GDI yesterday, but I was when I first connected to the show pre-show on yesterday's show, which was episode forty one eighty eight. I had had a power outage. It wasn't anything major, but you know, all my stuff had to be turned back on. And I always forget that. So Todd said I was listening to the show. And I suggest that Sarah plug her modem and router into a UPS. That's an interrupted power supply. It would keep her from having the issue with her connected devices. And Todd, you are correct. There's a little bit of a weird thing where I live, because I'm part of a very large Google Wi-Fi network where the router that's I'm pointing at it. You can't see it right now, but like the router that is my router is really just one of quite a few networked routers. And the modem is in a different house that's sort of in an outside shed thing. Like I'd have to be really confident that that would be a good idea. But you're right. That is an option I hadn't thought about yet. And I was thinking when I saw Todd's email that you could at least put a UPS on your rig downstairs. And even though that wouldn't keep the internet up in a power outage, it would keep everything from getting reset. Yeah. You know, it's true. Yeah. A lot of a lot of power issues around here. But unfortunately, it's not something I'm going to do tomorrow. But I think it would be a fun weekend project. So, you know, thanks. Thanks for putting that in my mind. Time for an uninterruptible power supply. Live with it. That. Oh, that's a good one. But then I just what do I do? Just wait for the priority. Right. Well, if it keeps the power from going out for six months for you, then it's worth doing. Indeed. Indeed. Well, thank you, Todd. And also we want to thank our brand new bosses today. They include Chasing Shadows. Good name. Andy, Chris F. All started back in us on Patreon. So thank you, Chasing Shadows. Thank you, Andy. And thank you, Chris. Yay, a triple play. A hot trick of new bosses. Love it. Also, big, big thanks to Tim Stevens, your first show of 2022 and hopefully not your last. Let folks know what you've been up to lately. Thanks, Sarah. Yeah, we've been doing, of course, all the coverage at CES and we're gearing up for that big reveal of the BMW, excuse me, the VW ID buzz so you can check out the coverage there at theroadshow.com. And I'm Tim Underscore Stevens at Twitter and I'm apparently losing my voice too, just in time. Well, I'll let you rest that voice and remind folks that we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Love to have you join us live. If you can, we'll be back here doing it all tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.