 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you! That's right, you right there listening to me right now. Thanks to all of you, maybe your Irwin Sturr or Ken Hayes or Phillip Shane. Coming up on DTNS, why is Apple dominating the smartphone sales charts? Why streaming TV boxes are so essential and yet so awful? And why you you just might pay for mastodon? Don't don't say no, it might tear us out. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 7th, 2023. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From San Francisco, I'm Nicole Lee. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheng. Apple is making a yellow iPhone 14 now. There, we've covered the big news of the day. All right, pack it up. We're done. Kidding, of course. Here's what we think is the big news of the day. Let's start with the quick hits. The autonomous trucking company Embark Trucks plans to cut 70% of its staff and shut down two offices. CEO Alex Rodriguez informed employees remaining staff will focus on winding down the operation saying, quote, we have been unable to identify a path forward for the business in its current form. Man, I thought I thought autonomous trucks were going to be the safe bet. So weird. Here's some chat GPT news that you're not seeing everywhere. Salesforce released Einstein GPT, an open AI powered tool to help generate sales emails, answer customer questions and create marketing content. These are the kinds of tools that are really going to be used from open AI. Company also announced an invite only beta for a chat GPT Slackbot, which can be used to summarize channel or thread content, as well as as a general research tool. The makers of the Remarkable 2e ink tablet announced a new $199 type folio accessory. It offers full size letter keys, offers two screen positions, connects over the Remarkable's magnetic accessory port, and comes in ink black or sepia brown colors. Now, if you're like me and you love the Remarkable 2 for many reasons, but you don't actually do a ton of daily sketching or free form annotating, this is a fairly pricey but welcome add on. Yeah, no, that's good. Good to know. TikTok announced a new monetization feature called series, which lets a creator post content behind a paywall. While TikTok gets more like YouTube, Facebook wants to be more like TikTok. Facebook has been pitching itself as a discovery platform of late, rather than a way to keep in touch with friends and family, even though almost everybody who uses it uses it primarily for the latter. So further to keep you on the platform, Facebook is testing the idea of getting Messenger messages while you are in Facebook, instead of having to go to the separate app. Now, if that sounds familiar, it's because you could do that until 2016, when Facebook broke Messenger out entirely. Facebook head Tom Allison wrote on a blog post that quote, over the coming year, we'll build more ways to integrate messaging features in Facebook. I mean, call me crazy, but I can view messages within Facebook. I can't view Facebook within messages, so there's that. But anyway, we'll see how it goes. Sonos announced two new speakers. We have the $250 Ara 100, designed to replace the Sonos One speaker, has two tweeters to output stereo channels, and a 25% larger subwoofer. The $450 Ara 300 supports spatial audio and can also be paired with a Sonos soundbar as rear surround speakers. Both support Bluetooth, USB-C, line-in, and support true play tuning for room-optimized audio. The company also said that its customers will get access to Apple Music's spatial audio, starting on March 28th. And that are the quick hits. All right, so Medium opened up its Mastodon instance to all paying medium community members. So if you are one, you know that it costs you $5 a month. If you want to pay for a year, it's $50. But you can also access a lot of Medium. There just is a subscription option that gives you some other stuff. Medium subscription service removes ads, lets you read articles offline, and now lets you join me.dm, that is the Mastodon instance. Signing up is really easy. If you're already a paying member, you know, you have access. It can copy over your profile from your Medium account. And as a user, you also receive a hand-picked user recommendation and Medium's trust and safety team will, they say, handle moderation on the instance. Well, yeah, they'll handle it. We'll see how well they handle it. I don't know. They'll probably handle it just fine. But yeah, this all brings up an interesting point. Mastodon can work in a way that centralized platforms like Twitter and Facebook cannot. Mastodon can just be an add-on to another service that still interoperates with other Mastodon instances. Instead of a centralized platform for advertisers, it's possible that Mastodon or even Blue Sky, which works the same way, could succeed by getting subscription services to adopt it as a perk. Facebook would never let you do that. They want to lock you in. They want you to put messengers inside of Facebook to keep you there. Mastodon doesn't care. Mastodon's just an open platform. You can add it on as a perk if you want, Medium or anyone else. Nicole, does this get your wheels turning? Yeah, full confession. I kind of already do this. So XOXO is a conference that, well, it's kind of defunct now, but for a while, it was this annual conference about Internet and culture, and they have their own medium, sorry, Medium. They all mess it up on Instance too, and you can only join the mess it up on Instance for this XOXO.zone if you weren't an attendee of this conference. You can only do that. And I had to pay to join this conference, so I guess that's paid to join? It's a perk, isn't it? Yeah, it's a kind of thing we're talking about. And so the benefit for me is that it's, for example, I'm the only Nicole on that instance that's a benefit for me personally. So I think the similar thing for medium members, I'm sure, like you're the only, I don't know, Tom, you're the only Sarah for this, you know, that could be a benefit for you if you think of it that way. And it's a smaller instance. You would think there'd be more personalized service. I mean, I don't know, right? And also, I think very in that same article, in that same article that this was cited in, in the Verge article, I mean, John Gruber mentioned that the benefit of this is that you know the money that you're paying is going directly to supporting this instance, right? Because a lot of mess around instances, even though they're free, like, there shouldn't be free, right? You should want to donate to that instance admin to keep that instance going. But if it's free, a lot of people probably won't pay. Well, and the whole free thing is like, I mean, you know, I'm always like, great, free, I love free. But it also means no one's really beholden to me to change, you know, whatever they would like to change because it's like, bull, I mean, you're just hanging out here. You know, as, you know, a person who's enjoying a free service, like, you didn't pay for something, we didn't promise you anything, and we can change it on a dime. When I first saw the details of the story, you know, my mind immediately went to like, huh, that's interesting. So Medium was born out of, you know, it's been around for some time, but Evan Williams and Biz Stone, two Twitter co-founders, co-founded Medium. And it was, you know, they're disparate companies, sure. But I always got the sense that, you know, everybody was kind of, you know, there may be some shared board seats and people were playing nicely with each other. This, it does, maybe there's no drama involved, maybe there is, hard to say. But for Medium to say, this is what we're going to do, and we're going to do on Mastodon is a little interesting to me. I think, you know, the more interesting thing is, if you already pay for Medium, there's nothing that you lose by at least seeing what's going on in the conversation on Mastodon's, I'm sorry, on Medium's Mastodon server. You might not like it, it might not be the place for you, but it doesn't, it seems like a pretty cool perk because you're not paying more to have that access. Yeah, there's been some big questions about Mastodon's success. One is, can it reach scale to where people, enough people are using it that it gets that momentum that keeps it being used because there's enough interesting people on it? And another is, how do we pay for the infrastructure? And we touched on that just now when we're talking about, well, if it's a volunteer run Mastodon, who doesn't want to take ads, which most of them do not, then they're relying on you out of the generousness of your heart, donating a PayPal or Patreon or something like that, or they have to put up a paywall. Well, while everybody is reporting this as Medium makes you pay to use their Mastodon server, it's more complex than that, it's more nuanced than that. They're saying, you get a free Mastodon server if you're a Medium subscriber. They're not raising the price, they're not taking away any of the other perks, they're adding a perk and they're saying, and with Mastodon, you're not locked in. If you don't realize it with Mastodon, if you decide to change servers, you can take your identity and your followers and your data with you to your new server. So even if you sign up on Mastodon with Medium and then you're like, you know what, I don't want to pay for the Medium subscription anymore, you're not totally locked in. It's not super easy, but it's pretty easy. If you want to do it, you can do it. Yeah, you can move to it. I've done it. I've moved Mastodon servers, an account on Mastodon servers before, it's not that hard. So you're not totally locked in by paying Medium to get on their Mastodon server. I mean, what if Apple does this? What if bigger companies than Medium decide, you know what, let's make this part of our subscription service. Apple One now has an Apple Mastodon server. I'm not saying I see Apple doing that, but I could see a larger company doing something like this. It just seems like, especially because Medium is built on people writing and sharing and being social about a little, not necessarily super long form stuff, but people who are willing to engage and comment on others posts and follow each other. Medium has been doing this for a while, pretty successfully, to just see, hey, how does the community link up with each other on something like Mastodon? Maybe Medium would say, that was a fun experiment. Let's go to Discord, which it could do. Or there are a variety of other ways that you could have people interact with each other in a little bit of more of a text short form way than what a Medium post might be, as much as we know them to be today. I think this is a great idea. They might say, well, fun experiment, but what did you lose? Nothing. You just knew of your community that is already paying for the service that you provide, what they were interested in also getting as a perk. Sabine 1001 in our chat room says, in my opinion, it's just not a good perk, plenty of good Open Mastodon servers to use. This is not a perk for you, but it's a perk for others. There's a lot of people who are like, yeah, I don't want to try to find a good Open Mastodon server to use. I don't want to try to decide which one to trust and which one to sign up for. So what Medium is doing is making it easy for those people, if they're already in the Medium community, to sign up. And I think that's something others besides Medium could also do. And it won't be a perk for people like Sabine 1001. I don't dispute that, but it will be a perk for others because it will make that onboarding process really easy. I think it's also important to remember that Medium, you know, I have a Medium account. I post something every so often. It's basically a blog post that I'm just not putting on my own website. You can use it that way, but there's a lot of, it's almost Tumblr-esque in a way. You know, a lot of people posting a lot, following each other, commenting. There is a pretty strong Medium community. And I think that's what that company wants to see replicated on, mastered on, in a way that, you know, is yet to be seen. All right. Let's take a look at this counterpoint research report. They released the best-selling phones of 2022. And for the first time, one brand has eight of the 10 top spots. It's Apple. Samsung took the other two. iPhone 13 was the best-selling phone of the year, topping the charts in China, France, Germany, the UK, and the US, and therefore globally. The 14 Pro Max was the top-selling iPhone 14, not the iPhone 14. The Max coming in at third behind the 13 Pro Max. The iPhone SE took ninth, thanks to strong sales in Japan. If you're wondering about Samsung, their two slots were the Galaxy A13 at fourth, and the A03 at tenth. And those were the only two LTE phones in the top 10. Now, the prevailing wisdom over the past few years has been that Apple is for the elites and Android is for the rest of us. Nicole, looking at these numbers, do you think that's still true? I think iPhone has been just been around for so long. Like, it's, frankly, ubiquitous at this point. And I think you're right in the sense of, oh, it's for the least. And I think part of the reason why people think that it's because of the price point, it is more expensive. Especially in other countries that are not here where you tend to buy the phone like wholesale retail instead of being subsidized by subscription prices. But I think that's just the mainstay. That just shows you the power of the brand and the power of just being around for so long, having that trusted name brand. Samsung's been around longer in the phone space, though. Like, why Apple? Why the iPhone? I think in terms of smartphones. I think, well, for Samsung, I think there could be a little bit of a division there. Because I know for my mom, she doesn't want a flip phone. She doesn't want a flip or a fold or anything fancy. She just wants a phone. She just wants a regular phone. And I think in her brain, like Samsung, it's like the weird flip fold, the flippy foldie. Which is funny because it's like, I mean, it is if you want to pay for it. It is if you look at the advertisements, too. That's how they're marketing it. Yeah, I think also we underestimate how many people say, well, I like Android. Android's way better. It's got a task manager. It has the ability for me to control my information. But as soon as someone in their family who's not as tech savvy as them wants to buy a phone, I've heard so many people be like, I'm just going to get them an iPhone. Because I'm going to have to do the tech support and the tech support is going to be easier if I get them an iPhone. I wonder how much is that multiplier effect leading to iPhones showing up on the chart so much? Well, you know, as somebody who last, I guess it was about summer of 2022, I needed a new iPhone. My iPhone was very long in the tooth. I had a 10S Max. And so I got the 13 because I knew the 14 was going to be out in a couple of months, but I could not wait. So I didn't get a discount on it. However, I think a lot of the sales in the, you know, the second to latter part of 2022 had to do with some discounts, depending on what market you're in. And depending on what phone made the most sense for you. You know, I always go Pro Max because why not? But I also don't buy a new phone every year. Because that's just not working on that kind of cycle. Everybody looks at the price of the top most expensive iPhone. But if you look at the SE, if you look at the iPhone 12, which they still sold last year. Quite a few. Those are, you know, starting to get down towards mid-range price levels. The only thing they don't have are what Samsung hit, which is those entry-level phones, those A-series phones. Apple doesn't have something like that, at least not yet. I wonder also about refurbished sales and the Q sales or like the phones that are gently used and they're being sold in the secondary market and whether that's part of the equation or not. Because I'm sure that's part of it, especially in the other countries where they don't sell them at an Apple store. They sell them at a, you know, third-party retailer. I know, for example, like in Malaysia, there aren't that many Apple stores, but there are tons of resellers. And I have to imagine that's part of the equation here. Yeah. And I think CPOT's 50 in our chat room has it right. If you really want to be off the hook with tech support with your relatives, just tell them you have Android and that you don't know anything about Apple and can't help them. And then that. I mean, I'll try to help. But like the last two iPhones, I screwed up really bad. I have Android. Can't help you. Sorry. Yeah. Smart move. CPOT's. All right, folks. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Go do it. The National Football League will play a game the day after Thanksgiving this year for the first time and it will be broadcast on Amazon Prime Video for free. Amazon's going to not make you have a Prime subscription if you want to watch that Friday game, but you will need the Prime Video app, of course, which means more people are going to be buying streaming boxes and confronting the disappointments therein. Yeah. So David Pierce wrote an article for The Verge titled, All the streaming boxes suck now. There are no good streaming boxes and I blame everybody. David, tell us how you really feel. Now, he asserts that streaming boxes are just cheap hosts for apps. They're not fulfilling any of the promises of what streaming boxes could and should have been. You can't turn on a box, for example, say the name of what you want to watch. This is true. David, I'm with you on this one. The tech is there, but it doesn't often work. He sums it up as the state of the set-top box world is like the industry agreed software is king and then immediately through the iPhones, the galaxies, the pixels out of the market, leaving us to choose among track phone, blue, Motorola and nothing else. But you might say, okay, well, how did we get here? Yeah, the searing metaphor. One culprit Pierce identified is the streaming services themselves. They only want you to use them. They live in this fiction where you only subscribe to one. And so they keep their data away from the platforms and they try to get you to subscribe to services from within them if they can. Apple TV plus lets you add on. Paramount plus lets you add on. Amazon, of course, lets you add on. And then the platforms themselves also have conflicts like their own streaming services, their own advertising preferences. Roku is an ad company now. Retail when you're talking about Amazon and Apple and more. He points out that Tevo and Slingbox were more powerful hardware in their day than what we have now. He does give partial credit to Apple TV and Nvidia Shield for getting the closest to sort of the ideal modern streaming box, but even those have shortcomings, some of which they can't overcome because if you can't get the data of what's on Netflix, you can't easily tell people what's on Netflix. So do we think David Pierce is right? David Pierce has been around this business for a long time, super smart guy. But do we want the Samsung Galaxy S23 of TV streaming boxes? Or are we fine with cheap streaming dongles and built-in TV operating systems? Are those really our best choice? Nicole, want to take this one? So I read this article and I was thinking about it. And he was going on about how the streaming boxes are terrible these days. There's nowhere even close. And my gut reaction was like, oh, they're not that bad. I mean, they're not great, but they're not as bad as all that. And as I was thinking really more about this and how hard is this. So another anecdote is that the other day, so the big Oscar movies, everything, everywhere all at once, we all know this, right? So how do you watch this? See, if you go over to like, I want to watch this movie. And so you're like, I don't know what streaming service is on. I don't know where to watch it. Can you rent it? I don't know. And the fact that I even have to ask this question is kind of an issue, right? I have to like Google it. Oh, it's on Paramount Plus. Oh, okay. I have to like subscribe to this service to watch this movie. Or I could buy it on Amazon or iTunes or something. And I understand it. I get it. But I also, so I don't know. I feel like there is definitely a discrepancy. And the issue right now is that there's so many shows and there's so many movies and there's so many TV shows that it's hard to tell someone, oh, I want to watch this really popular TV show that's being nominated for the world. But it shouldn't be. We have Stockholm syndrome. We're sympathizing with our captors here. Like, no, no, there's too many things. You should be able to just go to a Roku or an Apple TV or a Fire TV and say, I want to watch everything everywhere all at once and have it immediately go, great, it's available on Paramount Plus or you can rent it for $2.99, which would you like to do? And that's just not the way it works most of the time. Now, I will, you know, as a Plex empathizer, I won't say sympathizer because it's great. Plex does this really well. Now, whether you're running your own Plex server or not, you might have been invited to join someone else's Plex server. And Plex will sort of be like, well, this server doesn't have what you're talking about. However, here are the other options that you have if you want to go ahead and bounce out to HBO Max or this is a Paramount show or whatever, because I never know. I don't know anymore unless I'm like Unical where I'm like, Google, where can I watch this show? Where can I watch this movie? Like, I don't know, just tell me. I'll pay, I want to, I want to right now. And I think you're both right. You know, the fact that Tom, you're saying this should be so much easier, super true. And Nicole saying, is it that bad? I also agree. Not that bad. There are precious few times that, well, okay. So the MMA fight the other night was a great example of this where I was like, oh, it's like a pay-per-view thing on ESPN Plus, which I don't subscribe to. But like, is there another, like, do I get it another way? Other people I know wanted to watch the fight. Wasn't really anything I cared about. But, you know, it was gonna be, you know, sort of a live event. I wanted to participate. And it took me a while to figure out, like, how to get it. And I eventually went to like some weird YouTube stream that was like, clearly illegal because I didn't know what else to do. Well, and you don't, you don't know what the right path is, right? Well, you want to find something on the internet and your browser, you go to a search engine. You might not go to Google. We might go to DuckDuckGo. But you go to a search engine. You know what to do. We don't have that pattern with streaming boxes because if you search, it may tell you it's not available when it is. So you never trust that. You can go to just watch on your phone and 90% of the time it'll tell you what's there. But it's updated manually because nobody shares their data. So sometimes they're a little behind. And I've run into things where I'm like, oh, I know this is available somewhere and it's telling me it's not. So we don't even have a standard. We don't even have something where like, oh, well, this should work. So everybody has a different method of starting. I was trying to watch the blues penguins game at Justin Robert Young's house two weekends ago with his brother. And we didn't know or like, should we just search? Is it on ESPN plus? Should we go to the Sling TV? Like there's just no starting point for people. And I think that's a problem. Well, and the companies that make the set top boxes also have different goals in mind, right? Oh, yeah. You know, you got Apple. You've got Amazon. You've got Roku. These companies all make money in different ways. So if you're familiar with one platform and you go to another, I mean, sure, maybe your experience will be fine, but often you're like, what? I don't even, you know, this is like totally different. And I don't know why. Yeah. And like to your point as well, and David Pierce mentioned this in his article too, is like, a lot of these set top boxes also have their own services. Like Roku has a channel. Amazon has its own Prime Video. And they're going to favor those services on their set top boxes. Like it's right up there in like the big welcome page. Subscribe to Amazon. Like it's right there. Yeah. So yeah. I think that was damning evidence as he pointed out that the Nvidia Shield TV is probably the best set top box you can buy. It's good, powerful hardware, neutrally designed interface to just try to get you to the stuff you want to watch based on Android. So it's got all the apps. And he's like, and even they don't talk about it. They don't want it. Nvidia themselves rarely talks about their own set top box. I almost never hear David Pierce do outside of tech circles. So. Well, if only we could just escape all this to the moon, Sarah. Oh, Tom, I've got good news for you potentially. There's a cloud computing startup called Lone Star Data Holdings based out of Florida, which announced it raised $5 million, pardon me, and seed funding to store data on the moon. Now, we don't always cover companies getting money, but this one's kind of interesting. So the series of lunar lunar data centers that Lone Star wants to establish would also would be not only storage, but also a platform for edge processing, which reduces latency, improves bandwidth on the moon's surface. Now you might say, okay, well, how many people would make use of it? Probably more than you think. Data centers on earth consume a lot of energy. We all know this. They contribute to carbon emissions. So the idea is that building more of those on the moon instead of more on earth would help with not making earth sicker and offer a secure way to store the data. So it's not just about carbon emissions. It's about being better about where the data is stored. Now, back in December of 2021, Lone Star had success testing at Data Center on board the International Space Station. The next mission will launch a small, really small, two pound 16 terabyte data center box to the moon later this year as part of initiative intuitive, rather machines, second lunar mission. Intuitive machines is receiving funding from NASA's commercial lunar payload services program as part of the Artemis program. So it'll initially be offered to companies for remote data storage and disaster recovery, but in the future, we'll add infrastructure to commercial and private moon ventures, both of which are ramping up on Mars, are wrapping up on the moon, and Mars soon beyond. Eventually, someday. Yeah, right, yeah. Yeah, I think this is fascinating because it is a risky idea because it may not work and you certainly can't send a team to fix it if it breaks, but it is a way to get people to be like, hey, if you need archival storage that is very secure, nobody's going to attack your data center. And this is it. And if they can build that business, then they will have a storage and data center business ready for orbital businesses that come on SpaceX and other low-cost operators that are going to happen over the next 20 to 40 years. So it's a long-term bet, it's a little bit of a risky bet, it's an interesting bet. The only thing that bothers me is that it's called Lone Star and it's in Florida and still can't, that still gives me dissonance. Oh, well, you have to think of the moon as the Lone Star, I suppose. Yeah. But that doesn't really make sense either. You know, thinking ahead here a little bit because this story, I was like, I'm really into this. Unless you feel like, you know, emissions on the moon are no better than emissions on Earth. But what is like the next sort of secondary market of this? You know, like what is the company that will go and fix the data centers that Lone Star has successfully deployed on the moon, but now says like, oh, now something's wrong. You know, the cold storage unit needs to be upgraded and we can't send anybody up in the next week. Then you got robots up there saying, we'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. You could you could definitely do some some chat GPT in our robotic box. To go do some troubleshooting. I mean, I'm only half joking. Like something like that is likely to be the situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thanks everybody who sends in great stories like this. If you ever have something that you say, you know, the DTNS team would love this, you know, whether it's moon oriented or not, do send it our way. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. Thanks to you and Nicole Lee for being with us today. We know you're a busy bee so let folks know where they can keep up with you. Yeah. You can just go to my link tree. I think it's link tr.ee slash Nicole nerd. It's all on there. Perfect. And you're at Nicole on Twitter. Yeah. You know, early adopters, it's a blessing and a curse. Also, also thanks to our brand new bosses, Nicholas and Super Simple Dove. They just started backing us on Patreon since we had our show last. Thank you, Nicholas. And thank you, Super Simple Dove. Yes. They joined the pantheon of patrons who get access to the Discord. They, some of them get the editor's desk, which is an exclusive audio recording that I make every week just for patrons. And Nicholas and Super Simple Dove can stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk about those TikTok filters, like bold glamour that make you look young and why TikTok is being a little hush hush and maybe a little suss suss about how they work. But just a reminder, DTNS is live and you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back at it tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Timing Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.