 Want to help out with your holiday gift guide recommendations? Record a 30 second audio clip of yourself explaining what the gift is and why it makes a good tech gift and email it to feedbackanddailytechnewshow.com with the subject line tech gift by Monday, November 22nd. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft gets all 1998 about browsers. Dear Apple, the government is not like all your vendors and why the chip shortage just won't go away. Oh wait, chip shortage. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 15th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, technology contributor to ABC News, author and host of the Tech John podcast, Stephanie Upfrey, welcome back. Hey, good to be back. Thanks for having me. We were just talking about Crocs and Uggs and wired headphones and all kinds of new trends on our longer version of the show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com. That is where you can join other patrons. We'd like to give a big thanks to Ken Hayes, Philip Shane and Paul Boyer today. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Bloomberg sources say that Huawei plans to license its handset designs to third parties under its Exnova business unit as a way to gain access to components blocked by sanctions. Potential licensees include China Postal and Telecommunications Appliances and also TD Tech. Huawei engineers are reportedly redesigning smartphone electronics to use Qualcomm or MediaTek processors rather than its own high silicon chips. Twitter acquired Threader. It's an app that lets you compile Twitter threads and share favorites. Threader currently works by tagging its account in a thread with the word compile to get a link to a summarized article of the thread. Threader co-founder Marie Denis will help build out the company's reader feature that is part of the Twitter Blue subscription. Samsung released its Android 12 based one UI4 update to the Galaxy S21 series. That's less than a month after the OS shipped to Pixel devices. The fastest that Samsung has ever shipped an Android update. The company plans to roll out the update to older Galaxy S, Galaxy Note and Galaxy A devices as well as foldables and tablets soon. We don't know exactly how soon, but soon. The company also announced the Galaxy Watch update that adds the fall detection feature from the Galaxy Watch 4 to the Galaxy Watch 3 and also the Galaxy Watch Active 2. On November 16th, Sky TV and now subscribers in the UK and Ireland will get access to ad supported content for Peacock for the first time. That's NBC streaming service. Peacock will be available outside the US for the first time. Sky platforms in Germany, Italy, Austria and Switzerland will get Peacock content in the months following that. No word on if a standalone Peacock service will launch in Europe. Google Photos now allows users to remove specific people or time periods from memories as well as rename memories or remove single photos. The feature was developed with input from transgender and non binary individuals to give people more control after over how old photos surface. All right, let's talk a little more about a topic that has a very reasonable man very upset and I'm not talking about myself. Paul Therat calling for the Justice Departments of Europe in the United States to investigate Microsoft over this. In Windows 11, searching for something in the Windows start menu opens search results in the Microsoft Edge browser with Bing, even if you set another default browser. So several third party workarounds cropped up, including one called Edge Deflector, which used Microsoft Edge protocol links to redirect users to a browser of their choice, their default browser. However, Microsoft has now confirmed that an update to Windows 11 will block app developers from accessing protocol links, meaning that workaround will stop working. According to a Microsoft statement, this is absolutely on purpose. Here's the quote. Windows offers certain end to end customer experiences in both Windows 10 and Windows 11. The search experience from the task bar is one such example of an end to end experience that is not designed to be redirected. When we become aware of improper redirection, we issue a fix. While Edge Deflector has a modest user base, Mozilla now offers similar functionality on Firefox and the Brave browser added a workaround feature in its roadmap. But neither one of those are going to work the way they planned. Firefox has said, yeah, the way we're going to do it isn't going to work anymore. This is like 90s era of Microsoft stuff, right? The whole, this wouldn't really bother me that much. If you sort of understand what's going on, I would say, Microsoft big company, they're always trying to do that to you, right? But the company is saying, here's the fix that we're issuing because these third party alternatives are unsafe for you. That's what gets my goat a little bit. Well, the thing for me is like, isn't this the same concept as having an app store on a smartphone? Like, it's your platform. It's your hardware in the case of a smartphone. It's your ecosystem. So when you're talking about, like they said, these end to end experiences, it's their task bar in their software. Shouldn't they be able to direct you the way they want? I mean, when you're talking about IP, this is their intellectual property. And if they want, I mean, I get the idea that, okay, what's the point of having a default browser if you're not going to let me use it? However, this is also a ginormous sort of ubiquitous operating system that they have a right to sort of manage as they see fit. So I kind of see both sides of this. Sure, sure. No, you're absolutely right. Microsoft has the right to do this, right? I don't think you can argue they don't have the right to do it, but it's annoying as heck, right? Because it's one thing for you to have a workaround to something and then an update breaks it and you never know, like, did they break it on purpose? This happens with Apple all the time, right? Or were they just fixing something else and it broke that and they're not going to bother to make sure that this workaround works. This is Microsoft avowedly saying, yeah, yeah, we're all about an open platform. Set your default browser. Have alternate app stores, third-party downloads. Oh, except for the taskbar. No, we will actively spend engineering resources to stop you from working around that. Which is also one of the things the company touts is like, this is an extremely convenient way to look up things. Use this. Are that many people using the taskbar for search? I literally have never used the Windows taskbar for search. My browser is always open on my machine. So with 30 different tabs in Chrome. So I literally only use the taskbar to find software that's already on my device. I'm not using it to actually do any sort of active search. I didn't realize this was such a big deal. And like, are this many people using the taskbar for search? I mean, I'm sure there's a few out here. I guess we'll hear from the people who do now, right? But yeah, I don't think it's that widespread. I don't think that's a big deal. Plus, it's also not changing the search engine. It's just changing the browser. Right. Well, this also might be weird to you. Moving on. IBM announced its Eagle Quantum Chip on Monday. That's a 127 qubit quantum processor. IBM claims it's the first quantum processor that cannot be simulated by a classical computer. You might say, well, what's a classical computer? Those computers are slower at certain things than quantum computers. But even so, a supercomputer could model how a simple quantum chip works until now. IBM says a classical computer would need more bits than there are atoms in every human on the planet in order to simulate Eagle. That's a great way to describe how fast it is. The matrix. IBM also says that the increase in power comes from a design that puts all the qubits on a single layer and control components on other layers. But you might want to know, okay, sounds great. What can it do? Quantum volume is one metric for that. That counts not only the number of qubits, but how they interact with one another. The more interactions, the more complex operations the chip can execute. But IBM didn't release a quantum volume for the Eagle. So we're in early stages here. That's because it's an exploratory system and it doesn't guarantee uptime performance or quantum volume. IBM also doesn't claim quantum supremacy. That's the idea that a quantum system can solve problems that a classical computer cannot. Members of the IBM quantum network, which include academic institutions, research labs, startups, and also private companies, can try out the Eagle on the IBM cloud. Yeah, so this starts out sounding like a big step forward in quantum computing. And I think it ends up sounding like a smaller step forward, but still a step forward in quantum computing, right? Well, the whole report just seems way premature. You don't have anything really. You don't know how to measure it because the supercomputers are too slow. There's no way to quantify what you're actually doing and how fast it can actually go. So why don't we kind of hold off until we know how to measure whatever it is you're trying to measure? I mean, it all sounds very impressive. When you throw the word quantum in there, it just automatically makes it sound very impressive. But then you start reading farther and you realize that they have no way of judging how good this thing actually works. So it's kind of like... But yeah, they've got one metric. We can't take current computers and simulate it. Okay, that's a real valid metric. But that's it. And so the rest is like, hey, if you're a member of the IBM quantum network and you're engaged in quantum computing research, go mess with it. Try it out and see what you can do with it, right? I think that's great. But yeah, it's a small step. There's a little bit of this that, you know, how companies kind of go like, you don't have to be right. You just have to be first. There you go. That feels a little bit what the ego quantum chip is to me. And it probably, I'd have to believe that, you know, they wanted to get this out there first with all the metaverse conversation that's happening. We're probably going to need this type of computing to make that a reality in any way that's going to matter to most people. So, you know, if they can get in bed with Facebook or, you know, whomever and say, yeah, we got the chip that'll make it happen. Like you said, I agree, sir. It's like, let's just do it first and figure it out on the back end. Well, back in September, Apple announced it will let residents in eight U.S. states store digital state IDs and driver licenses inside Apple wallet. That's because they've got partnerships with eight states. They would like it to be more, but they don't yet. CNBC, however, obtained memorandums of agreement with four of those U.S. states in this initial launch, Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Those documents show that Apple is basically treating the states like it would any other vendor, which sometimes makes sense. Other times it does not. It means Apple maintains a lot of direct control over how the feature is rolled out, but no control over how it's operated. One of those I think is better than the other. Apple maintains control over when the feature is launched, what device it rolls out to, which really means you can only roll it out to Apple devices. I think that you could make a bigger deal out of that than it is. I mean, shocker, Apple will let you roll it out on iOS. State agencies must maintain their own computer systems for issuing and validating the IDs and reporting on compliance. I think that's good, too. You don't want Apple running the state ID system. You want that fully under control of the state. The state also has to designate project managers to answer Apple's questions, which seems reasonable. Neither side makes payments to the other. The contract also requires states to market the feature with a digital ID proactively offered to new license holders. Apple also gets final review and approval on marketing efforts. This is where it starts to feel like, well, wait a minute, you know, the state of Kentucky is not like, you know, I don't know, Belkin or something. This is a little weird. States can only terminate the contract with Apple with Apple's consent or for cause, which also seems very restrictive. Georgia and Arizona are going to be the first two states supporting drivers licenses in Apple wallet. Stephanie, what do you make of this? I don't think there's any way our data doesn't get used in some way other than what we expected to get used in. Because it seems like, you know, from the article, and we talked about this a little bit on the Tech John last week, but it seems like from the article, the benefit to Apple is more people buying iPhones because now you have this capability of storing your ID information on the phone. I don't think that's a good enough reason to buy an iPhone. I mean, I have an iPhone, I love iPhones, but if I didn't that wouldn't be the thing to put me over the top to buy an iPhone. So I think there's going to be some other ulterior motive here for Apple to do this. And even if there's not, it just opens up that potential can of worms. I mean, we saw this back with the domestic terrorists and the police needed the information off the phone and that whole thing in the back door that they wanted Apple to build. Like you're just giving them more ammunition to be able to request that kind of information. So, you know, I personally won't be storing my ID on my phone. I don't know about anybody else, but like I don't need anybody to have a reason to need to hack my phone for even more data. I actually, you know, when this when the feature potentially was going to roll out to people like me, I was like, great sounds awesome, you know, while it gets smaller every day type thing. I'm not in one of the states that we're talking about in this particular conversation. But it's tricky because in some sense, I understand the tone that has been taken with some folks saying, hold on a second taxpayers are paying for Apple to have all this control where it should be in the control of the state. And there's a lot more to it than that. I don't necessarily think states themselves could responsibly roll out something like this without the help of a company doesn't have to be Apple, but a company that has the infrastructure, you know, server capacity, you know, all of the brain power behind it. But it does get a little weird when it turns into, yeah, it has to be on, you know, our own hardware, and we're going to be managing a lot of, you know, what may or may not go wrong with this. And it's kind of, I don't really know what the solution is, but it seems pretty par for course for a company like Apple, but I don't what is the alternative. Yeah. Well, I think you, you would want something that's a little more open standard and doesn't leave out the 70% of the population that has an Android device. I think that that's a big part of it for me. I'm a little less skeptical on this and I'll probably regret it and tell Steph she's absolutely right one day. But I don't think Apple's motivation is to collect data here. I think it really is to just say, hey, look how cool and advanced our stuff is, which is why they're saying the state should run it, the state should do it will help, but the state should be in control of it. Because I think they don't want your data on their phone on their servers. They want it to just be on your phone. And there's a whole other argument to be had about whether you want to do that or not. And I think that's that's perfectly fair as you may not want to jump into this. I think there is a secure way to do it. I think there needs to be a lot more transparency around that and a lot less control by Apple around that. That's where I end up anyway. Folks, where do you end up? Send us an email. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Wired's Will Knight has an excellent review of the chip shortage up in an article called why the chip shortage drags on and on and on. We have been talking about the chip shortage for almost two years now and there were times when we thought, oh yeah, by November 2021, this should all be clearing up and it's not. Now, Will Knight's write up is absolutely worth a read, but let's sum up some of the points here. The economy shut down back in March 2020 and nobody knew what to expect. It turns out people shopped a lot online. We know this now. They shopped for electronics. Sometimes to distract themselves from lockdowns in the pandemic and other times because they needed to work from home. Worldwide, chip sales fell 12% in 2019 and were expected to rebound around 6% in 2020 and 2021. There was a huge drop briefly in early 2020, but sales grew 29.7% between August 2020 and August 2021. Nobody could have expected that. That was driven not just by people buying laptops to work from home or Nintendo Switches to play Animal Crossing, but 5G rollouts and cloud computing expansion on top of all of that. A flood of orders outpaced the ability of chip makers to ramp back up from standstill, the worst hit being automakers who really thought people would stop buying cars and instead people returned to buying cars a lot faster and in greater numbers than anyone expected. Cars are among the products that use a lot of chips made on older processes and those factories are fewer because older stuff isn't a growth industry, so there was already a tighter capacity. There was more demand than capacity for pretty much all kinds of chips though. The consensus was, you know what, that was a blip, we just need to work through it, catch up, and we'll get back to normal. Except all kinds of things kept getting in the way. COVID breakouts at factories, unusual snowfall in Texas, floods, droughts, fires, all slowed down the factories catching back up. Still, that would have just delayed the recovery if there hadn't been the toilet paper phenomenon because lots of companies worried about the chip shortage started ordering more chips just to be safe, making the chip shortage worse as demand increased, making it harder for the fabs to catch up. And the U.S. restrictions against Huawei caused an extra amount of panic among Chinese companies who began stockpiling chips just in case they were next on the list. Fabs are now at capacity. Gartner estimates in Q2 2019, fabs operated at 76.5% of capacity. In Q2 2021, they're at 95.6% capacity and they probably can't get any closer to 100% because you need to be down for maintenance. So you might ask, okay, so we add more factories. You can and many companies are, but those take years to get built and then to come online and start building chips. Intel's new fabs are expected to come online in 2024. That's three years away. Companies are going to want to build new fabs that make advanced chips, too. So that factory will have a long, happy, profitable life. They're not going to want to make a fab to build the old chips the automakers need. So automakers aren't seeing the hopeful increasing capacity for a lot of their chips, although Sony and TSMC are building a fab for older components. That's expected to start making chips in, guess what, 2024. Some companies have invested in new capacity for older chips only after they get a two-year commitment to buy the chips from their customers. And some companies don't want to invest in making new factories at all because they expect the demand will end at some point and they don't want to get caught building a factory they don't need. All of this is made more complicated because logistics is still snarled from the change in demand patterns. That's the thing that causes ships to get backed up, offloading goods in a port. China just announced that integrated circuit output fell for the second month in a row because of logistics issues. They can't get the parts to build the integrated circuits. They got production capacity. They just can't build them. They can produce ICs. They just don't have a steady supply enough of parts and equipment to make it at the levels that they should. So, there you go. That's where we're at. And I don't know that anybody knows the way out except to just keep pushing forward, I suppose. I mean, the easy, you know, listening to everything that you just said, Tom, the easy answer is like, all right, we got about three years for this to shake out. But I thought one of the most interesting points were companies saying, yeah, but then when demand plummets and we've, you know, spent all this money on fabrication that all of a sudden people don't want. Companies don't want to do that either. So there's like a hedge and bet stuff. There's a whole thing of that going on. Yeah, there were a couple things that stood out to me. Number one, the hoarding of the chips because I know there's somebody with a warehouse somewhere probably in China that has, you know, a jillion chips just sitting around that could be used and could alleviate some of the pressure on the market. So how do we sort of mitigate that? Is there a way to mitigate that? Go to these companies and say, hey, just, you know, please suck and we have some more chips. There's something I don't know. The other part that I thought was really interesting was the price gouging on the older chips. It was a part of the article where it said those older chips that used to cost a dollar are now costing $150 in some cases. So how do we deal with that as well? You know, I know it's capitalism. That's kind of what it is, does what it does, but, you know, can't we figure out a way to regulate that somehow, at least under these, you know, extenuating circumstances and get some relief that way? And then just, you know, sort of on a existential level, it was just like, do we even make anything that's not smart anymore? Like, are there things that we can use and do and that don't work? We have literally, it just really brought into stark contrast our complete dependence on these chips at this point and the fact that nothing's getting made, none of our devices are going to work. Just the idea that this kind of thing could hamstring an entire electronics industry and it's just boggling my mind right now. Yeah, that was another thing the Wired article pointed out was some companies are promoting their older models because they have fewer chips in them. And so it's easier for them to make those at scale because of that. So don't be surprised if you find like, you know, a couple years old model of a toaster or rice cooker or something out there because it's easier for them to make that. My smart fridge started making really weird noise this morning. And I was like, Oh, no. Here we go. Oh, no. Well, in the pursuit of thinner smartphone bezels, everybody wants it to be thinner, faster, stronger. We've embraced a lot of camera module styles and the notch or the hole punch, whatever you want to call it is one of the things that has some some folks have been trying to figure out. Last year, ZTE released the axon 20. You might remember it was trying to eliminate the problem entirely with an under display camera so you had no notch at all. The problem, though, was that the quality of the images wasn't very good. Soon after the axon 20 Samsung released a similar under display camera with the Galaxy Z Fold three quality problems. Hmm, still there. However, a handsets released this year seem to be figuring out the problem with the Xiaomi mix for and the ZTE axon 30 both offering camera quality that's at least possible. It's not abysmal. It could be better, but it's getting better. This isn't just phone makers though using better sensors or fine tuning algorithms. The first gen taking on this tech used a lower resolution idea of the screen to allow light through. Aside from poor quality, this also made the camera area pretty noticeable on a light background. Not everybody's going to like that either. The newer phones actually shrink the sides of the pixels on the screen, but keep the number and the resolution the same. This seems to let in more light and reduces its visibility. So the photos look highly processed, but not bad like flip phone. Xiaomi and ZTE aren't the only ones invested in this area. However, Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group is also working on under display cameras to help users maintain eye contact during video calls. And it obviously depends on where that camera is that you can't see behind that screen to do so. Yeah, that's the thing that caught my eye because I think the people who don't like bezels are very loud. But I don't think that many people really hate the hole punch, really, really hate the notch. I think most people are like, whatever, it's fine. I'd rather have a good camera. But then when they mentioned, man, if you can get under display cameras good enough where I don't notice a difference, and then it just takes away that weirdness where you're like, oh, I should look at the camera. So I'm making eye contact. If you could just naturally look at the screen, that's kind of cool. It's really not that big a deal for me, but it'd be kind of cool. I get that. I'm with you. Yeah, it's like, okay, I just, it's funny when I always have debates with people about whose cameras better iPhone or Samsung or whatever. It, for me, at least in the past now, I think we're sort of in the noise with comparison. But in the past, I always got hung up on how much image processing Samsung did to their photos. And I'm like, they look so good because they're kind of artificial. And a lot of the what you're going to get with this technology, at least in the near term, is going to be due to image processing. And I'm not, you know, any sort of photography purist or anything like that. But that idea just, you know, strikes me as something that is not something I would want to have in my photos. So until they can figure out, you know, how to do this with a little less of that. I mean, I think that's, that's just par for the course for any smartphone camera. But it seems like that's, you know, 60% of what's going to get you this photo on the under, under lens, under screen cameras. So until they figure out that part a little bit better, I'm like, and like you said, the notch is not that big a deal. I've never understood why it's such a big deal. I get that if, if done well to say, hey, look at my phone, there's, there's no camera. It's hidden and it, and it takes beautiful photos. You'd be like, that's awesome. What a cool, what a cool advancement. But until we're there, I don't want that feature in order to have subpar photos and or videos. Or, or, or a screen weirdness, right? That seems a bigger deal. Like if the front facing camera isn't as good, but it's good enough, I'm probably okay with it. But if you, there's like a big gray circle in the middle of my display, like no, no, don't sacrifice my display for that. And then they were talking about how like in the area around the actual camera lens, they'll have fewer pixels there, but not anywhere else. And it's like, so what if I'm watching Netflix? Like, is there going to be a little spot on my, on my screen while I'm watching a movie that looks weird compared to the rest of the screen or whatever? So it's just, yeah, they don't have enough of this figured out to make it. I'm just going to keep trying to wipe it. You're like, what's that spot? Looks like a fingerprint forever. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. We got a nice one from Brandon who wrote and saying, I just wanted to let you know I really enjoyed Science News Monthly. I need to pay more attention to the science news in life. And this was brief, but informative. Thanks for being awesome. Well, thank you, Brandon. Yeah, if you're not familiar, or if you missed it on the weekend, DTS Science News Monthly from Dr. Nicky Ackermans, our science correspondent. First in a monthly series, kind of summon up all the tech science news of the month. So the first episode came out on Saturday. If you haven't listened to it yet and look forward every month right here in the DTS feed. And thanks to everybody who writes in and gives us our feedback. Please keep it coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also have some brand new bosses to thank today. They include Judge J. Lo, Frankie Chinich, Nicholas Kleinhouse, and they all just started backing us on Patreon and you can join them as a new Patreon member. Thank you, Judge J. Lo. Thank you, Frankie. Thank you, Nicholas. Yeah. Good stuff. Man, Judge J. Lo. No, I was like, hey now, Judge J. Lo. Thanks to Stephanie Humphrey also for being with us today. Stephanie, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. They can find me all around the web at TechLifeSteph. They can check my website out at tilldeathdewtweet.com. And of course, please download and subscribe to The Tech John. That's J-A-W-N, The Tech John. Excellent. Well, we're live on this show Monday through Friday, 4 at 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow doing it all again with our guest Dan Campos. Talk to you soon.