 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thank you, including Hi Tech Oki, Jim Hart, and Logan Larson. Coming up on DTNS, why the sub-stack Twitter dispute is different than other recent Twitter controversies, where does the PC market go from here? Up? Maybe? And maybe we don't need apps on our smartwatches anymore. Maybe we don't. No seriously. Get better battery life. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 10th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merrick. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Truffalino. From deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, we have got, we're going to dig into the Twitter sub-stack thing. And we've got some takes you haven't heard before, so stick around for that. Let's start with the quick hits. Tesla announced it would start construction on its next battery mega factory in Shanghai, China, set to be finished by the second half of 2024. It will produce up to 10,000 large mega-pack batteries a year. Each mega-pack can store energy to power roughly 3,600 homes for one hour. So this isn't the one you're going to put in your garage. This is like for a city. Tesla plans to sell mega-packs produced at this facility globally. Tesla has already installed mega-packs in Australia. When they were having outages there and in Texas to help mitigate power outages in both places. Last month, Amazon announced it would shut down DPReview.com on April 10th, making it available in a read-only mode for a limited time. Well, it's April 10th, and DPReview's general manager, Scott Everett, now says the site will remain available in an archive, and that his staff will keep publishing stories while it's working on that archiving. Last month, the volunteer archive team, coordinated by the internet archives, Jason Scott, had said it would scrape and archives the sites content. They speculated about three weeks there. Yeah, I bet Scott Everett's team could make it last longer. I would. In 2020, Uber acquired Kareem, not spelled like Abdul Jabbar, but like bouncing off of things, C-A-R-E-E-M, the operator of a super app by the same name, available in 10 countries across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. As is common with super apps, Kareem includes a lot of functionality. So ride hailing, you'd expect with Uber owning them, but food ordering, financial services, et cetera. Well, Emirates Telecom announced it has acquired a majority stake in Kareem, so it's not fully Uber anymore. And Emirates is going to spin it out as its own company. Uber will continue to own all of Kareem's ride hailing business and remain a minority shareholder in the company. Oh, voice assistants, they're popular with tons of people, just not the people that make them. Both Amazon and Google have reportedly cut back on the resources that they are devoting to their smart assistants. Now, nine to five Google noticed the latest example. The Google Duo support page says Google no longer provides software updates for third party smart displays from Lenovo, JBL and LG. ArtsTechnica points out that that leaves the Google Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max as the only Google Assistant smart displays currently on the market. And it also notes that all Lenovo smart displays are listed as out of stock. So, you know, one in the coffin for third party assistant smart displays. Yeah, poor one out. I think they'll stick around. But I'm very curious what the business model is going to be going forward. Do you remember when Russia got kicked off the Swift network and everybody was brushing up on the Swift network, the payments network for interbank stuff? Yeah, you all remember that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is worth keeping an eye on. India is making inroads with an alternative to Swift. Rest of World reports on India's success, getting countries to adopt the unified payments interface. We've mentioned it here and there on the show, UPI. Since its introduction in India in 2016, it has surpassed credit and debit card usage there. Everybody's using something that uses UPI instead. Transactions are facilitated using just your mobile phone and a QR code. There's an identity verification thing involved there as well, but it's pretty easy to access. And unlike Swift, UPI can be run entirely on a nation's own tech stack, which would protect it from being blocked worldwide, as happened to Russia with Swift. Singapore has started using cross border payments between PayNow, its own system and UPI. Bhutan and Nepal have also launched UPI and companies like Google and Walmart have developed payment apps that use UPI. India has also partnered with banks and payment companies in the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE and Singapore to support UPI for remittances, sending money back home and tourist spending. So you can use UPI when you're traveling abroad. Plus, the Philippines and Morocco are developing digital national ID systems, kind of a precursor to UPI based on open source code that is used in UPI. So that's really all we need to know right now. But keep an eye on what India is doing. They are playing their neutrality well. All right, let's talk about chips. Yeah, so TSMC, big giant company that make a ton of chips, but they're not immune to everything that's going on with the PC market, particularly PC market slumbering right now. It missed analysts forecast and Q1 even saw a 15% drop in revenue for March. It's first revenue drop since May 2019. Part of that might be because of Apple, one of TSMC's most prominent customers. And they took it on the chin and PC shipments. We saw figures finally from Q1 IDC showing that Apple's PC shipments fell 40.5% in Q1, the worst among the top five companies. But don't feel too bad for Apple. Everybody kind of saw double digit drops. So they were just the worst of bad drops. Total PC shipments in the quarter fell 29% on the year. Yeah, my take on this is that Apple avoided it by by having the M1 chip, which delayed people stopping upgrading their apples. But go ahead. You know, you can add to all of this that the current CPU lineups from Intel and AMD aren't giving people a lot of reason to upgrade. Sharon Harding of ours, technical notes that the 13 gen Intel chips for popular thin and light laptops offer modest CPU and GPU performance gains, mostly holding up low single digit percentages while still commanding that price premium as the subhead for the arse technical piece. Would you pay 42% more for a 7.8% productivity boost? The answer that the market is saying is maybe next year. Well, as you two, would you? And if not, what does that mean for the PC market? I mean, yeah, this makes perfect sense. Our arse technicals article is a brilliant one because it really catches your eye and also good advice, which is, hey, there are some genuine improvements in the chips if you're doing video editing, if you're doing video gaming. But if you like the majority of buyers, maybe not the majority buyers in the DTS audience, but the majority of buyers out there just want an ultralight by last year's, it's going to save you money. And you're not going to miss it out on much. Yeah, and we're still kind of seeing where battery life falls with a lot of these 13th gen chips, depending on the implementation. A lot of stuff that manufacturers are doing. So there is the like we've seen some early evidence that there might be a little bit more of a battery life increase. So obviously, thin and light, you're going to be taking to places. Maybe that is worth it. If you're the road warrior that needs, you know, that extra 10% or whatever battery life for 42% more. But when you're talking about mid level chips, 7.8% out of mid level is not all that much in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, we're also at a point where it comes to consumer technology like this, that you have to wonder in a world where I buy a phone, if not every year than every two years, I buy a tablet maybe once every three years, I have smart assistants that are talking to me all the time, how much is that delay your need to buy and see, do you need very specific things to change for you to buy them at all or so much of the daily driver elements that used to be what we would define our relationship with these products now just fundamentally different because we interact with so many other different things that we're already spending money to upgrade on a faster cycle. Yeah, the PC replacement period periodicity was dragging out before COVID. And then everybody upgraded at the same time because they're like, well, I've been meaning to upgrade and I'm going to be working from home. So this is this is the after effect. As I said, I think Apple delayed it by having such a compelling offering with the M one and the M two chips. But now it's also feeling it because everybody who was going to upgrade to the M one or M two has. I think we might be at the bottom, at the bottom of this market. Most interestingly, Apple's Q1 2019 shipments 4.1 million Q1 2023 4.1 million. They're at where they were at pre pandemic in terms of shipments. Yeah, at the bottom. Now we're here. Still at the bottom. Practice. Wait, no, that's not related. All right. When it comes to smartwatch ecosystems, it's largely a two horse race. If those horses are operating systems, according to counterpoint research in 2022, Apple's watch OS had just under 57% market share, followed by where OS with around 18%. So between the two of them, they've got just about three quarters of the overall market. That other quarter is made up of watches largely running proprietary real time operating systems or RTO S's. Those have way better battery life, because they limit the amount of time an app runs, it runs to do the thing and then it stops. You don't have multitasking. You don't have things running in the background. Since each RTO OS is different, it's hard to get developers to keep making apps for those watches. But xda developers Chris Waddle recently wrote up a piece wondering, now that we've figured out the core use cases for wearables, we just aren't using that many apps affect a lot of companies are stopping apps. Maybe we just need two or three apps. A lot of those apps are made by the watch company if they're running an RTOS. Do we even need an app store on our wrist at all? Well, in in the world that we were promised for smartwatches, yes, I do believe that if we were to go back to when the Apple Watch first debuted, and we saw something that was a more feature rich than largely fitness trackers plus plus plus, which I think largely makes up the rest of the non wear OS non Apple or Apple Watch OS market share. I don't think I know for me, I would not be expecting that we would only be here in terms of the development. What I wanted was the proliferation of one button apps because there are there are apps for which I very much still believe should only live on my wrist over among them. I should be out. I should hit a button. It should tell me basic ideas on where it is. And it should track my my my GPS. So I know exactly when to get in there. I'm not worrying about addresses. I'm not doing any of that. We're not there. We haven't been there. Batteries a choke point and apps just might be in the mushy middle of history. I think a lot of that stuff's going to go into the headsets if headsets take off. But but the opposite of this is the amaze fit. It's a wonderful looking watch looks better than I would argue most Apple Watches look and it does the basics tracks your heart rate tracks your your workout. It's kind of all you need, right, Rich? Yeah, I feel like when you say the basics, I actually think that's we figured out what we want out of smartwatches given the processing power and the battery life that we can realistically get out of something on our wrist at this moment. And that is it like there's a lot of the demos that we saw from Apple, especially when they went cellular and they're like you could just leave your phone at home and you can do all this stuff. You're making payments and you're doing all this great stuff. And most for most people it's I want to know when I got a text. I want to know like when my heart rate how my fitness stuff is doing. I want to do some sleep tracking maybe and that's kind of it and when you're coming when you're putting resources and developing an app experience like that when so often, regardless of what that is, I can think of very few apps where I never feel tempted to get kicked back to the phone. And when you're looking at those basics when you're looking at comparably less cost for something for an rtOS like device, you're looking at, you know, better dynamically better battery like like just the night and day 14 day long battery life for the amaze fit right versus almost a day for Apple watch. I will say with my series seven, I'm about a day and a half like just how I use it. Now granted, I got two kids, I'm a homebody, you know, I'm on Wi-Fi most of the time. So like maybe I'm the corner case there. But yeah, even still like 14 days. That's a I'm forgetting when the last time I charges, I never forget when the last time I charged my Apple watch. Yeah, you know, there's certainly for various different use cases. And whenever you're into the idea of a fitness tracker, then you have no guarantee that one person's use case is going to be the next one. For example, our our friend of the show Brian brushwood is a terrible sleeper. So he is obsessed with whether or not he slept well. And so he does not want an Apple watch that needs to be charged and usually needs to be charged at night, or he's going to find himself with a dead watch halfway through the day. He needs one of these real time operating systems, because they will always be on and he just has to remember once a week to charge it eventually. And meanwhile, he's going to get the use case out of it. That I think will always be there for tracking. Now where the future of tracking goes is a different story. For this particular thing, rich, I think you are absolutely right. That's what people want now. But it is just an agreement between, okay, this is the only thing that we can get out of this. We have not had significant user interface design changes for watch apps. They were basically just sort of small screen versions of phone apps. It really is, I think, a large disappointment compared to where they started and what I thought that the potential were. I have a sneaking suspicion that that's all they're going to ever be good for. That the stuff that we thought they'd be good for in taking the burden off the phone is going to go somewhere else. I said, mixed reality headsets, maybe that's crazy too, but maybe it's something else. Maybe it's headphones where you can hear notification. I've long, long, long been a proponent for the audio only internet. I love getting my text messages over my earpods. I'm not going to lie. Folks, what do you love about this show? What do you not like about this show? We want to hear it all. So if you have some time, please fill out our latest survey. We're running it through this month. Let us know what's working for you. What is it? Just visit dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. It'll only take you a couple minutes and it's going to help us out tremendously. That's dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. Previously on the Twitter sub-stack spat. All right, let's catch you up. If you don't already know, Matt Taiibi was one of the journalists that partnered with Twitter to get access to internal documents showing how information was handled under the previous Twitter management team. The big star story was the president's son's laptop. He posted this analysis on Twitter and his sub-stack because he makes most of his money off his sub-stack. That's important because Wednesday, April 5th, sub-stack announced notes. Notes is a feature slowly rolling out which lets authors post short updates to their sub-stack subscribers. You know, around a couple hundred characters and then the subscribers can thread comments on them. Sort of like Twitter. Well, Thursday, Twitter began limiting replies, retweets, and likes for posts that had a link to sub-stack in them as well as showing safety warnings when attempting to click on a sub-stack link. It also disrupted the ability to embed tweets in posts on sub-stack. I was able to embed one tweet on my sub-stack on Friday but not anymore. I have no idea why. Friday, Taiibi said he was told it was a dispute over the new sub-stack notes platform because he's a sub-stack guy. He's also working with Twitter so he went to his inside sources. They said, yeah it's because of sub-stack notes. So he said, well then I'm leaving Twitter and he has not posted on Twitter since Friday. Saturday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk accused sub-stack of misusing their API access to download part of the Twitter database to bootstrap what he called a Twitter clone. Sub-stack, of course, denied the accusation. And Sunday, users once again could like reply and retweet sub-stack links, the safety warning no longer appeared if you clicked on a link. So Justin, I know it's catnip to ask you to talk about journalism but let's talk about journalism. Yes. There's a lot of examples of Twitter under Musk causing controversy and then the underlying cause goes away but the controversy and the intention kind of helps Twitter out. It gets people to think about Twitter and therefore go back to Twitter and use Twitter more. Do you think this is an example of that? Yes, in the general taxonomy of the issue that you are talking about but I offer it with a gigantic caveat. I do believe that we are in a land of diminishing returns here. If you're to look at the 10 possible, I can name 10 possible things that could happen on Twitter up to an including Taylor Swift posting a note about her dissolved relationship or Donald Trump saying hello world that would be orders of magnitude bigger in terms of a pop culture sense that actually brings recognition to the platform then Elon Musk having a very, we often cover things on Daily Tech News Show involving Twitter and they pass the Tom Merritt level of news judgment. This is an actual story that we would talk about on Daily Tech News Show because it involves a lot of technical things and is a little bit salacious and juicy but it's not here for pop culture consumption. I don't think that most people who are just randomly thinking about Twitter and might want to get back on because there's a fight would log back on for this but it is an example of what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Rich, what do you think? Just from an outsider because I'm not a journalist and I don't pretend to be one on a podcast but like there has been enough times now since November that it seems of all like journalism already looks like a thankless job and then to have another thankless task on top of that. At first blush it makes you wonder why are we still seeing people on there? Then I remember when I go to Mastodon there are no journalists. Like I follow a ton of journalists on Twitter and I find I see none of them, not that I don't follow them, I just don't see them in my feed because of the way Mastodon is. There's not as many journalists on Mastodon as there are on Twitter because you're going to get somebody saying there, Jeff Jarvis is on Mastodon. There's a ton of journalists over there but there's not as many. I follow a ton of them but also because it's just chronological I also don't see them quite as much and I'm not as engaged with that because it doesn't surface thing that are getting a lot of engagement that might be of interest to me because of the way Mastodon works. I don't see journalists on other platforms other than if I'm literally going to the Washington Post or The Guardian or something like I'm literally reading their work is the only other way that I engage with them. So I am of two minds where I'm like this seems so thankless and so slippery and so like anything that you're putting on that could go away in a second but at the same time I can't deny that this is still the primary way that I'm engaging with journalists outside of literally just reading their work. The Messing with Substack is the first time where I personally side. Usually I look at this stuff and I'm like you know what he's going to change it in a couple of days and it doesn't really affect me. This is the first time I looked at it. I'm like I really hope he changes it in a couple of days because this could affect me and it did. I was only off by a day or two where now it's back and it did everything happen the way I expected it to happen which is they got mad or maybe they didn't get mad. I don't know what they did but things were bad and now they're back to the way they were on Tuesday of last week. That seems to be the cycle. I think the big danger of Twitter everyone is not everyone getting mad and leaving. The big danger of Twitter is just people over time getting tired of this sort of thing and just slowly using it less. I've noticed that Felicia Day responded to a post I made about it on Twitter that she's like yeah I'm seeing the engagement lowering because the people angrily leaving and then quietly coming back that doesn't tell you anything. The actual drop in engagement across multiple accounts not just mine that would be telling and I see flutterings of that. I think it's still early enough that it's probably not fatal but this is the kind of thing where your doctor says like if you keep doing this eventually you're going to do it one too many times. I don't I mean look if there are long-term problems with Twitter then we can connect them to the long-term problems that Twitter had before Elon Musk bought it. This is ultimately still the same haunted house in regards to who the management is. The problem with Substack and Twitter specifically is that they work particularly well together. Substack is a place in which they have offered they were very very smart about building up their stable of talent of people that used to work at big name places that just did not know and would not care to to learn the technical way to start a quote unquote blog and could benefit from a network effect of having everything on one site. Substack was smart to do that but their top talent are gigantic Twitter users. It is where they stay in the zeitgeist. It is where they continue to post for free so they could eventually get people back on this platform that you know much like various other subscription services you can set where the paywall is. If my aunt Mike says I noticed your problem was that it wouldn't allow you to add links to your Substack post. Couldn't you do it manually. It wasn't it wasn't that it wouldn't allow me to add links to my Substack post. It was that it wouldn't let me embed them so you could you could just put a link in there and Substack would automatically turn it into a nice pretty little embed and without the embedding working all you could do was link to them which is not nearly as compelling to people so that would that just to clarify that that's the difference. Can I add one note personality wise in this specific dispute. When we're talking about an issue between Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi we don't exactly have a lot of shrinking violence. Matt Taibbi for regardless of what you've thought about the Twitter files is a polemicist. He has been like that his entire career. I've always enjoyed his writing but you should always understand his writing that he writes angry and he writes from a point of view. Elon Musk is Elon Musk we've discussed enough. These two are not going to back down with each other and it's amazing that they got along. Anyway yeah it's over. Yeah yeah yeah. I do I do want to put a code on this by pointing out that Twitter owned review which I preferred to sub-stack. It was amazing its embeds were even richer than what sub-stack does but Twitter closed down review and so it doesn't even have its competitor to sub-stack anymore so the idea that it would block sub-stack was just ridiculous. Again to bring it back to what you said Justin I'm glad it's over. But one thing that's never over of course is our collective love of pizza and perhaps pizza technology and in the fine tradition of innovating on both Domino's has added Apple CarPlay support to its app. If you tap to order on the CarPlay interface it sends your easy order which I don't know if I'm comfortable with to your main store which means you have to set up an easy order and the main store in your phone to actually use this feature. You can also use this bold call to order if you want to order something different which just calls the store. Can I just say this Domino's has owned this market. It holds money, PR things. I will say that they're absolutely good. It is a worthwhile app. It is easy to add your your order. They have a fun little loading bar thing that that goes once you order. It is a good user interface but boy do they unintended dying out on these little PR. They do. They do but they also work. I remember trying the Messenger chat bot on Facebook years ago. Yes. Yeah and it worked. I was like oh I'm ready to rip this apart because it's a publicity stunt. I'm like but it actually it actually kind of worked so I mean that you know as long as they keep delivering haha on the promise you know good autumn. I don't want to start a beef. I don't love their pizza but I do like their technology quite a bit. It worked on my pebble watch. Speaking of smartwatch is my pebble watch for years. Domino's thank you for supporting the pebble watch. All right let's check out the mail bag. Oh wait that's the wrong one. There we go. All right well chip from thawing Boston. I can definitely relate. Wrote in with some thoughts about how to deprecate a product. He says hey DTNS crew. After other companies cough cough wise have retired their older product lines with limited notice and a tiny discount to replace them. It was nice to get an email from Nest today. I'm disappointed they're no longer supporting the legacy drop cam but I understand the need to phase out older products and they've supported the drop cam for almost a decade after they purchased the company. They Google that being. The fact that they're giving users a full year's notice plus free replacement cameras up to two is a great example of a company taking care of its customers. I hope as other legacy smart home devices start getting phased out other companies will follow Nest lead. Love the show. Keep up the great work and keep up the great email chip. Yes thank you employee of Google chip. No I'm just kidding. It's good to. I don't know if chip works for googly probably doesn't but I will say as somebody who does not subscribe to Nest connect. So I only get the 50 percent off coupon for new Nest cameras. I don't get the free ones. I still think they handled it pretty well. I mean those cameras are really old. So they are not going to work forever. The only thing I wish the only thing that would make this better is if they allowed you to just kind of lock them up and use them on a local network somehow. But there's plenty of ways to hack that yourself. So it's not it's not too awful. And as chip points out it's actually quite a bit better what they're doing than what has been done with other cameras in the past. So good point. Well thank you Justin Robert Young for being here today especially because this is a big week for dog and pony show audio. Tell us about world's greatest con. World's greatest con is available now the third season episodes one and two on the pod catcher of your choice in the late 1970s two boys arrived in St. Louis Missouri to work at a lab at the Washington University in St. Louis school. The skills that they showed as child psychics were staggering. The only problem they were frauds and they not only helped critter away four million dollars adjusted for inflation worth of a donation that was sent to that school but also damaged the careers of the people that they eventually came to know as if not friends than father figures along the way. It is a staggering story told from the perspective and with the two boys now men who had that experience go ahead and listen to the first two episodes right now it is world's greatest con find season three wherever you find a podcast. I could not stop listening to them you're going to enjoy it go do it right now. I think you guys I think this is the DTNS you're the audience. Yeah absolutely. Very much you're gonna very much like it from from age demo to technical elements to the emotional beats I feel like you guys are gonna you guys are gonna love it. Awesome good stuff Justin and also thanks to our new boss Steven who just started backing us on Patreon thank you Steven. Steven started our Monday off right by becoming a patron over the weekend so you if you're listening to the free feed you want to get ad-free stuff you want to get editors desk stuff from me you want to get access to our discord become a patron right now and you can keep our good week going. In fact Steven now is one of the patrons who gets access to good day internet where we extend the show talk about some more topics we're going to be digging into the success of the Super Mario Brothers movie. Nick with a C just got back he's in our chat room right now we'll reveal what Nick with a C thought of it and talk a little bit about how it may be finally ushering in the age of video game movies not bad video game movies stick around. Remember you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC you can find out more daily technewshow.com slash live we'll be back tomorrow talking about DNA scanning using lasers with Dr. Nicky Ackermans see you then. This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Vitamin Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.