 Coming up on DTNS, Apple just goes and dumps a 16-inch MacBook Pro in its store. Chromebook users finding it cold in the shade that Apple's Phil Shiller threw. And Sony bringing back game cartridges. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, Wednesday the 13th of November 2019. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From my dark pit in Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And from somewhere in LA County on the show's producer, Roger. Is that your sith name? Dark Pit. Dark Pit. Yeah. Ew. Hey, that's not what we were talking about a good day internet. We were actually just talking about why I irrationally want four terabytes of space in my laptop and other things like that. If you want that wider conversation, you got to get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should doubt. Alibaba released its secondary listing plan in Hong Kong. The company plans to sell 500 million new shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with an option to add 75 million shares subject to demand. Alibaba will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange as well, as it has since 2014. Sweet. I still get my stormtrooper outfits on there. The Windows 10 November 2019 update began rolling out to those who go in and request the update in Windows update. This update is mostly stability and performance improvements. It includes a managed notifications button for more control, like permanent mute from apps, that sort of thing. That'll be a welcome addition here for me. You can also hover over the start button without having to click and even or excuse me, add events to calendar from the task bar. That's pretty cool. File Explorer search has also been improved. Tencent reported a 13% drop in quarterly profit with falls in revenue from smartphone games, media advertising and computer games revenue. Tencent has faced tighter Chinese government control on games. That really has affected mobile. There's also a slowing economy in China and there's more competition for Tencent from ByteDance, who makes a do-it-in in China and that other one. What's it called? Tick something? Tick talk? Yeah, tick talk. That's it. Yeah, the advertising fall was blamed on unpredictability and releases causing lower intake on Tencent video. However, Tencent did see rapid growth in commercial payment services. Tencent's first profit fall since Q4 last year. Q4, bad quarter for Tencent the past couple of years. Revenue rose 21% to 97.2 billion yuan, but was still short of expectations of 98.2 billion. U.S. Federal Court in Boston ruled Tuesday that suspicionless searches of smartphones and laptops at U.S. airports violates the Fourth Amendment rule against unreasonable search and seizure. U.S. border officers must now demonstrate individualized suspicion of contraband before they can search a traveler's device. We'll see if that gets appealed. But so far, no word on that. All right, let's talk a little more about Google getting into the banking business kind of ish. Yeah, maybe not in the way people think. Google will partner with banks and credit unions to offer checking accounts as part of its project called CASH spelled C-A-C-H-E, like clear your cash, that kind of cash. Google will put the financial institutions front and center with customers, unlike programs like Apple Card. Google will gain insights from data and use that data to help the banks develop better products. Google does not use financial data, including existing data from Google Wallet and Google Pay as part of its advertising program. Google may also offer the loyalty programs on top of the bank offerings, as well as possibly waiving fees. Google is working with Citigroup, Stanford Federal Credit Union, among others. It kind of reminds me of their travel search situation right now, where you basically can just do a search for travel and it will hook you up with buying from the airlines. But Google isn't operating a travel agency. They're not operating an airline. I think what they're doing here is a little similar to that. They're going to have partners that say we'll offer checking accounts to Google customers. If you'll help us understand the customers data a little more, the data doesn't have to be Google's. It's just Google saying, yeah, we'll provide our AI services. That's one of the things we do to help you figure out more about your customers and hook us up with the customers. It's a marketing plan as well. There was a great article on The Economist this week about the fact that it is easier to set up an online only bank in Europe than it is in the United States, especially easier in UK, because they have laws specifically to help you set up an online bank. In the United States, you have to get a bank charter to set up any bank, whether it's online or not. And one of the things the bank charter usually requires is a physical presence. So when you see those online only banks, they're generally using another bank as the platform provider. And I think this is a way for Google to try to help bring online only banks to especially younger people looking for a new bank account by saying, hey, here's the ones that that have all those online only features you might want. Yeah, I think somebody who's a little bit more of the, you know, I care about my data and maybe slightly paranoid will say, OK, well, they're not using it for advertising, supposedly. But how what kind of insight are they gaining? And is this going to be an issue for me down the road? Yeah, potentially. I mean, I feel like you even just say the term checking account. And I go, people still have checking accounts. And I guess that that is still a thing. I'm so used to. I have a checking account. Yeah, the checking account doesn't mean you write checks. You may never write a check on your checking account, but it's the one that you can easily set up to fund all of your digital wallets. Right? Right. And it makes sense that that I guess they're still just called that, but I was kind of thrown by that first. I thought checking accounts are still a thing. But for me, my entire life revolves around a business account and a credit card, paying down that card every month, which I use to pay for all my services and whatever. And then you just pay that card off every month. I think a lot of people probably do that, but it never occurred to me. Not my 22 year old daughter. She has, she needs, she needs different kinds of services for the kind of sort of just getting started sort of life she's living. And this makes a lot of sense potentially if, you know, if the services are services she wants. So it'll be interesting to see how they do. Disney Plus announced it has more than 10 million signups since it launched on Tuesday. Now they were signing up people earlier. I think that's counted in here. But as of now, Disney says they have 10 million signups. Hulu, which Disney owns, reported more than 28 million subscribers in May. Netflix claims more than 60 million paid domestic members and more than 97 million international. So 10 million on day one. Not bad progress for that little upstart Disney. If you are still having problems with Disney Plus, we talk some about that. They seem to be going away, but I'm more.com has an excellent write up about why you might see the famous error 83 on Disney Plus. The first reason seems to be less of an issue as we hit day two of the launch. That's a server timeout. Now, it's not the back end. It's not the video server. It's DRM. DRM requires authentication more than just when you log in. Any time it's accessing an asset, it may check to make sure that you are authorized to access, even just showing you a thumbnail, it may do that. So if the authentication servers are overloaded, it may take a couple tries to get your video to play and pass the DRM check to actually reach the server where the video is, I'm more says, especially with a laptop, the first time you use it, there's a way that by the time you press play, the DRM check fails and so you have to just kind of go in and then try to play it again and it should have passed by then. It can also happen if you're using a platform that isn't supported by Disney DRM, so Linux can't use Disney's DRM, so it'll just keep throwing you everywhere 83 Opera the same way, less popular browsers. If you're using something that's a little less popular than the big four, you're going to have the same issue. I, it's funny, this must be the gamer in me, but I went into yesterday knowing I was going to have problems. I figured with the service this big, with this much hype around it and the fact that it's Disney in their back catalog plus new stuff plus the Mandalorian, I mean, like I could make a list nine miles long or the reasons people are interested in this, I just knew it was going to be a little bit rough. And so as soon as I logged in, it gave me an error and it showed me Wreck-It Ralph saying, sorry, things down. And I said, yep, this sounds about right. I'll check this in an hour. See how we're doing. I checked it. It was fine. I got in, watched about four episodes of The Simpsons and then it crashed again or gave me the air again. And then I thought, I'll wait another hour. But for whatever reason, none of this really bothered me. And I heard people online going, ah, they want to take on Netflix. They better be prepared to be as good as Netflix on day one. And I just kept thinking, I don't think this exists anymore. When you launched this big, like if Netflix was the Disney of today and they were about to launch their service, I guarantee you we'd probably have some outages or some problems, plus Cox had an outage for a while, so did Verizon. So there are other issues not related to Disney Plus that were causing some customer's issues. So I don't think it's that big a deal. And I don't know what that makes of me. I don't know if that makes me. Well, we kind of kicked around this, this, this whole conundrum on the show yesterday saying, I mean, what, what's the worst that can happen? The worst that can happen is someone's like, I'm not going to subscribe anymore. I'm out of here. It's unlikely that somebody excited about Disney Plus is going to do that because of an error within the first three days of launch, you know, and maybe even longer. And it doesn't mean that it's not super annoying and confusing for people. But I doubt there is going to be that much of, you know, a mass exodus because Disney didn't have their ish together. Yeah, I think, you know, I think we're going to see fewer problems today as fewer people are trying to sign up all at once, like we talked about yesterday. Now I've already started to see people turn their attention. Who was it in here? Somebody was saying, are they even making money off this with all the free users they're giving out of that 10 million? They don't have to. That's one of the things that I haven't thought about enough recently is Disney could give this thing away for free and make the money up on merchandise. That is essentially the way Disney makes money is we get you into our park. We get you into our movie. We get you into our TV show. And then we sell you stuff. We sell you plushes. We sell you lunchboxes. We sell you dolls. We sell you stickers. I mean, look around, take today and look for somebody wearing something Disney. I bet you will find more than one, probably multiple examples. So the 699 is just a way to like make sure that you defray some of the cost of this launch. But the success of Disney Plus is going to be how many people they can get into the gate. And then sell them more stuff because they're so excited about the Mandalorian or high school musical or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, it's I was digging through it. And I'm I'm surprised how excited I am about things. I forgot Disney owned. So a movie would pop up and I'd go, oh, I didn't know they did miracle. The one about the Russian American hockey game that one time in 81 Olympics, whatever was like, I love that movie. And I forgot it was Disney. So I don't know. I feel like over the next few days, you're going to have a lot of discovery. A lot of people getting excited. You'll have a second wave of interest. They'll be more prepared for it. It'll come at a slower rate. The long term, a lot of outrage over older movies with culturally insensitive depictions, which Disney has already warned people about the cropping of the Simpsons and the first. Oh, yes. Stevens. Yeah. Big controversy there. We did get a lot of feedback from folks about the launch, some who either had issues logging in or didn't have issues logging in or had some thoughts about how it might have been handled better. Paul, the software entomologist wrote in and just again, lots of feedback here, but we only have time for one who said, I don't think it was purely a marketing decision not to have a prelaunch app ready for Disney Plus, because we talked about that yesterday. Maybe that would have mitigated some problems. Paul says, to do that, you either need the app done early, then you just flip a switch or you release an app to update the day of the launch with the first option. You have to have multiple platforms ready to go early with the second option. You have to coordinate a launch on multiple platforms still, so you potentially have the same problems anyway. Either way would be costly at Disney's scale. So kudos to the company for taking an agile software approach and just fixing bugs fast. Release early, release often. Yeah, he said he would have picked a rollout strategy by platform or by an invite system, but that has cost too. So yeah, I thought that was really smart of Paul to identify this as just an agile software approach. And at this scale, it's going to cause a lot of people to be upset that they haven't fixed all the bugs. But if they fix them fast, then I guess it's fine. Well, this might make some folks excited as well. A Sony patent patent filing from Let's Go Digital describes a solid state drive exclusive to Sony's PlayStation 5. So storage amounts ranged from one to three terabytes. The SSD slot in the PS5 would be easily accessible so that users could keep multiple SSDs handy. Sony has demonstrated near instantaneous load times in its SSD implementation in the PS5 and the company says it will release the PS5 by the holiday shopping season next year. So we don't know if this is going to be part of that, but it points to a potentially being part of it. Well, the way the design looks, it looks like it might have to be if implemented the way the design is. Like it's it looks like a cartridge style and gamers, just imagine this in your head, the old cartridge method. Take your old Sega Genesis cartridge. Imagine something roughly in that shape, a little longer that you would plug hot swappable, presumably into the PS5 with tons of games. Let's say huge terabytes worth of games that you just can't fit all on one. So you're like, well, I want to play that other game, pop that out, pop the other one in like we're back to cartridges potentially, but in a very different way, a very different kind of implementation. And if it's simple and somewhat affordable, I could see this taking off. I know most PS5 users or PS4 users and Xbox one users. Most of the people I know that own those end up getting a secondary drive at one point, either external or internal. So expanding storage, especially as the prices come down, is not that unusual. What will be unusual is if Sony can get people convinced to do this with a proprietary ish SSD interface versus some other external, you know, Thunderbolt or USBC style interface. And maybe they do both. They've done that in the past as well. But I'm really interested to see how this gets implemented because we've not seen the chassis of the machine at all. There has been no hardware reveal other than specs. So we don't actually know if this has been implemented or if it's purely a patent request on something they'll never do. But we'll know by at least E3 next year, if not earlier. I hope they call it the Sony memory slab in honor of the memory stick. I mean, look, that thing was so successful. Why not? In an interview with CNET meant to be about the MacBook Pro's keyboard, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller responded to a question about the phase or excuse me, the place of Chromebooks in the education market. Yeah, that's right. Chromebooks. Schiller told CNET's Roger Chang, not this Roger Chang, different Roger Chang, that Apple did a study and found that kids who are engaged have the best results and that cutting edge tech help them stay engaged. Schiller then said, quote, yet Chromebooks don't do that. Chromebooks have gotten to the classroom because, frankly, they're cheap testing tools and required for required testing. If all you want to do is test kids, well, maybe a cheap notebook will do that, but they're not going to succeed. Unquote Chromebooks cost the classroom about 150 bucks compared to the 299 for an iPad. Chromebooks have about 60 percent of the market share for laptops and tablets in the US as far as classrooms K through 12 are concerned. This is a case of why you need to make sure that the antecedent of your pronoun is very clear because people are hearing Schiller say, but they're not going to succeed. And assuming he means the kids and turning that into if kids use a Chromebook, they won't succeed in life, which is a horrible thing to say. I don't know that. I don't think that's what he meant. I didn't read it that way. They refers to Google Chrome Chromebooks. Yeah, the makers of the Chromebooks aren't going to succeed in helping kids because their Chromebooks aren't enough cutting edge and they can engage kids as much, which is still controversial, but much less. Well, the line says, if all you want to do is test kids, well, maybe a cheap notebook could do that, but they're not going to succeed. Meaning, as Tom pointed out, the books, not the kids. Right. So but even then, like you say, even then, it's still a little bit controversial. It's still a little tribal and weird, whatever. I mean, I feel like Apple gets a chance. Chromebooks are also more than cheap testing tools. I mean, you can do a lot with a Chromebook. So that is like, yeah, an executive from Apple would say something like this, but it's just a piece of junk. You know, that's all kids want. Well, you know, best of luck, everybody. But but but and that's not accurate. But I understand that Apple has to take the stance of will we go above and beyond? And you know, if you're not using our products, our services and our hardware in schools, then you're missing out. Yeah. And you're also paying half the money if you're not using us, which is an important point here. Like why wouldn't the schools give entire budget restrictions? Look at things like Chromebooks. The Chromebook in our house is my wife's favorite computer. She'd rather use that over everything. And I asked her why she says because it's simple and straightforward. And I don't worry about getting hacked every five minutes like I do on a PC. Hey, you know, it engages kids simple and straightforward and not getting hacked every five minutes. Not that Apple gets had iPads don't get hacked every five minutes. So that that's pretty much a wash. But but yeah, it's it's real. It's it. I would say the Chrome OS is simpler than the iPad OS at this point. Yeah. And it's fine for what it is. It's good. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech headlines dot com. Apple launched a 16 inch MacBook Pro Wednesday. The keyboard uses a one millimeter travel scissor switch. Goodbye butterfly mechanism that is used on the current 13 inch MacBook Pro still as well as the older MacBook Pros. You're also getting a physical escape key now to the left of the touch bar. And the arrow keys are in a T formation. Uh huh. The new MacBook Pro is point seven millimeters thicker than the previous one. So not much thicker, but a tiny bit bigger than the previous one. It has a redesigned thermal system with 35 percent more surface area on the heat sink. Fans that can push 28 percent more air through. So you're not going to have the heating issues that some people have had. You at least shouldn't. They maxed out the battery. The battery can only go to 100 watts under U.S. regulation. So they said we're just going to 100 watts. It only gets 11 hours of wireless web at 100 watts. So this thing is going to pull more watts than the older MacBook. But adding the extra 100 watts means that they can get an extra hour out of the battery. And also as a six speaker sound system, a three microphone array that they call good enough for podcasting, which I'm not sure if it's an insult to podcasting or an over estimation of their three microphone array. But the testing I've seen so far says it's better. It's a better microphone. I don't think it replaces a really good mic. 3072 by 1926 16 inch display. That fits in the same body size as the 2015 15 inch MacBook Pro. So the the most recent MacBook Pro was a little bit slimmer than this. But not again, not by much. And if you have a 2015 15 inch MacBook Pro, you're going to get a 16 inch screen in exactly the same size laptop. You can get a six core Core i7 or eight core Core i9 processor. You can choose from 16 up to 64 gigabytes of RAM and from 512 gigabytes up to eight terabytes of storage, the 16 inch MacBook Pro also completely replaces the 15 inch MacBook Pro in the Apple store starts at the same price at those minimum specs. It cost you two thousand three to ninety nine dollars. And if you speck it up to the max with all eight terabytes of storage, it's going to run you six thousand ninety nine dollars. They found my happy middle. I've been complaining about this for weeks. I almost went full PC on my on my production stuff. I could never find the software I needed to make that work right. So I just stick them with my old machine. It's aging out. I love Mac OS. I prefer it for a production environment, for audio, for art, for everything else. And I felt priced out of the market because my only options are I Mac Pro and the new pros Mac pros that are coming out at a minimum of six grand plus way more if you need a display and if you want their display way, way more and for a stand for that display. Another grand. So that thing was very expensive. Eight nine thousand dollars for a pretty minimum spec is not in my department. And the I Mac Pro is still starts at around six. So this has this is they came they swooped in with the thing that I think I can do this with. Like I didn't really want a notebook, but the truth is I just connect a big, you know, LG display to my existing Mac anyway, I'll just use that thing as a as a device that is my production machine, but I can take it with me if I need to. So I think they may have found me again. Yeah, one of somebody who was who was kind of in the market for a new laptop. I I I had yesterday. I was like, it's might come tomorrow. And then this morning I was like, boom, did. And he said, yeah, it's gonna be so heavy and traveling and do a lot of travel. And as you mentioned, Tom, this really isn't too different than a 15 inch Mac Pro that's a few years old. Yeah, it's slightly bigger, but it's mostly bigger in the display because the bezel is smaller. It's this is not something that was like the 17 inch Mac Pro of your, which I had one. And it is really hard to travel with, but it was also I mean, that's that's old news. It was also really great as a display, depending on what I was doing. And sometimes I was doing a lot of creative stuff on the go. And so maximizing the screen to a 16 inch Apple's obviously done, you know, they've done enough internal testing that they think that this is a sweet spot in order to get rid of the 15 because you wouldn't want you wouldn't want both. But but yeah, I I I feel like the size is polarizing, but maybe for the wrong reasons because people think, oh, it's just this huge laptop. I have a 13 inch road and 11 inch even MacBook. And it's not. I don't think it's the behemoth that that that that folks are worried about. Now, if you if you want a 13 inch laptop, then the 16 inch is still going to be too big, just like the 15 inch was. But if you like a 15 inch laptop, the 16 inch laptop is going to be the same size for all intents and purposes. It's just kind of better. If you have a four year old 15 inch MacBook Pro, it's going to be exactly the same size. It's not going to be any different. Yeah, it's really about specs and it's about that screen and whether you think that that give the fact that you're staying in the same form factor, yet getting an extra inch of diagonal screen is cool. I mean, for me, it's just that it's finally in a pricing place where spec for spec. Like I did I did this while we were getting ready for the show just as a quick comparison. But for me to spec out a MacBook Pro, the new one versus an iMac Pro to get roughly the same specs. And I know there are differences between, you know, the Xeon processors and all of that. But something close. I'm paying around fifty seven ninety nine for the iMac Pro and I'm paying with those same specs four thousand ninety nine for the for the notebook. And especially if you have an external display hanging out that can work, you know, that's nice. It's it's it's it's hard to justify that iMac Pro because I've done the same thing as you, Scott. And I want it, but it's just it's so much. But then also now the intern and that's with two terabytes of space. I didn't go the full aid or anything, but that's two terabytes on this on the way I spec the pricing out. That's with an upgrade on Ram to maximum sixty four. Currently I'm running thirty two, which I think still generally is a pretty good number for for Ram. But I'll go ahead and do that and still I'm can save a considerable money. So it's not exactly ideal because really I'll use it mostly as a shut clamshell over here with a bunch of stuff plugged into it. But that's the option they're giving me. And I guess I'm happy about it. I don't know. I'm still feeling. Well, I mean, there's always the the the fact of the matter is you can get a similarly specced laptop HP or Dell or or Lenovo for less money. It's usually not as much less money as people think because you can't really spec them out exactly the same. But it is more affordable to get windows. What what this is for is somebody who who prefers Mac OS and wants a professional machine and what I found most interesting about the way Apple pitched this. And I think this ties into the fact that they didn't do an October announcement is they are pitching these Macbook Pro Mac Pro and Pro display XDR and even that I Mac Pro as like truly professional options. These are for companies to buy. These are for freelance video editors to buy. These are not for consumers. And for a while, it felt like Apple was moving away from professionals because they were in they were empowering consumers to do great things with the tools that they have. And that was leaving professionals behind or like, wait, we we've got the money. We want to spec something out a lot higher. And it does feel like that's what they're doing now is saying, OK, we're going to make a Macbook Pro that is really for professionals. This isn't for the average consumer. They also announced that that new Mac Pro and display XDR are coming in December. So this is the new way of doing it. Professionals don't care about a big splashy announcement, right? You're not trying to bring in a wide net of people for these professional models. Professionals read the trades. They listen to shows like this and then they decide, OK, yes, that is the machine I want to have. So I think this is a smarter way for Apple to announce these things. And even though the 16 inch Macbook Pro isn't such a big spec upgrade over the 15 inch MacBook Pro, it is doing all the things people wanted. They wanted a scissor switch keyboard. They wanted more storage options. They wanted higher ram options. And they I think they hit it on all points for the professional here. I do, too. I guess I would just say part of me is bummed out that there's not. I liked that they were gravitating gravitating toward the middle, mostly for price. Also, people out there going, Scott, just build a hack and toss for half the price. I run a like reputable business. I can't do a thing that's like pretty dubious and illegal. Also, it takes a lot of time to maintain a hack and touch. It'll save you money. But if the money you save is lost because you spend the time make maintaining that. Right. Yeah, it's like it's time is money. Yes. Plus, you know, these things tend to last forever, the pro stuff, especially. And I just I think I'm I'm in a weird position where I'm both happy and sad that they are focusing on professionals again. But then it makes some of us who feel like we were kind of in the little middle pro area going, oh, I can't afford those. And these are too slow. And I hate that feeling. So this is the closest they've gotten to that middle again, and I'm happy for that. I mean, the Mount costing two hundred dollars. I was rolling my eyes pretty hard. But. Oh, well, you know, get what you get. A lot of things are expensive out there. Hey, thanks, everybody, who participates in our sub reddit. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord, which is livelier than ever. We're loving our Discord community. You can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Also, shout out to our patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels, including Philip Shane, Jeffrey Zilx and Paul Reese. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us. This this this happy hump day of ours. Happy MacBook Pro Day. I don't know if you're getting one. I know Tom is. So, you know, one of us is happy in order to think cool. What's been going on in your world since we saw you last? Oh, so many things, really, just the weekly business that happens every time over at frogpants.com. 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