 On this episode of DTNS, did you hear? I message and bing, aren't that big of a deal? So say Apple and Microsoft. You might keep a keen mind later in life with more internet usage, and Patrick Norton is gonna give it to us straight on our next soundbar purchase. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 5th, 2023. From Studio, I Need a Soundbar. I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunnwood. At the edge of the 314, I'm Patrick Norton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, after the holiday weekend in the U.S., we got quite an alluge of news. One of the things that came in, kind of right before we started the show, the European Commission is set to appoint Belgium's Didier Rennerds as new competition chief. Marguerite Vestiger has taken a leave of absence to run for head of the European Investment Bank. Now, on to the quick heads. Huawei and China's largest chip maker, SMIC, built an advanced seven nanometer processor for Huawei's Mate 60 Pro. Now, this is significant because Bloomberg News passed along specs from Tech Insights, which conducted a teardown of the Kirin 9000s chip that is in this new Mate 60. Huawei released the phone online last week, didn't offer any specifications on processor design or wireless connection speeds, although Tech Insights notes they're 5G speeds. The U.S. Congress Department hasn't weighed in yet on whether SMIC's supply of seven nanometer chips to Huawei violates U.S. sanctions. Microsoft is rolling out an updated Xbox dashboard, which lets you stream your gameplay to Discord friends and also has variable refresh rate or VRR improvements for the Xbox Series S, excuse me, Series S and X consoles. Xbox News voice reporting feature is also included as well as a new way to pair accessories to Xbox consoles. To better focus on investments, which means less focus on news, Meta has announced that is deprecating Facebook News in the U.K., Germany and France. Facebook News is the curated news sections for publishers with its own dedicated tab introduced back in 2019, but plans to further expand to India and Brazil have seemingly fallen by the wayside. Meta no longer seems to have the appetite for news as much as it is politically driven and the fact that legislators recently have been pushing for sites like Facebook and also Google to pay news outlets for linking to their stories. Lionel Messi, heard of him? Big soccer star. The Wall Street Journal reports that MLS Season Pass, which Apple TV Plus has exclusive rights to, saw more than 110,000 new U.S. signups on July 21st when Messi had his first match playing with the InterMiami. If you're wondering if that's a lot, Apple TV Plus saw 6,143 the prior day according to analytics company Antenna. This was a bigger jump than the day MLS Season Pass became available and on the opening day of the season. So, pretty big, pretty big jump. You know, we could talk about soccer, football all day. These were pretty big numbers. Yeah, that's a huge difference. Yeah. On Tuesday, New York City. Heard of it? We'll start enforcing a 2022 law requiring short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, Verbo and others to register with the city or face up to a 5,000 per stay fine. An estimated 40,000 locations will now need to comply with the new rules, but as of August 28th, only 257 licensees have been issued. Two licensees had gotten issued licenses. NYC believes that there are nearly 11,000 illegal listings in the city and that registering lawful hosts will be an uphill climb and I think they're right. All right, Rob, let's talk more about those little upstarts, Apple and Microsoft. Yeah, just itty-bitty companies. You know, the Financial Times reports that Apple and Microsoft are privately arguing that neither iMessage nor Bing are big or powerful enough to just the Digital Markets Act or DMA restrictions. The European Commission is set to publish a list of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Metabite, Dance, and Samsung on September 6th, that's today. But which parts of the said company's business operations will be covered is not known and Apple and Microsoft are fighting to keep iMessage and Bing free of the DMAs per view. Yeah, so the DMA is part of a suite of EU laws designed to curb the power of tech companies that are too powerful or deemed too powerful by everybody else. Everything that Rob mentioned, those are big companies, right? The Digital Services Act focuses on how platforms handle user data and moderation. It also went into effect in August. So we're seeing some of the first moves of this now. So, Patrick, we're gonna start with you here. Is iMessage in any way exempt from this? You know, if iMessage was an independent product, something you purchased through the App Store, sure. Same thing for Bing, but because they're parts of Microsoft and Alphabet, I just don't see either one of these escaping regulation. You know, the EU is, I think they are tired of playing catch-up with regulation and they're just gonna be like, hey, we're gonna put this up you, we're gonna deal with this up front. And I'll be curious to see what happens. But, you know, any subset of Apple and Microsoft, you know, even if it's a rounding error for them, it's still gonna have tremendous influence because, hey, Microsoft makes its money off of Windows. It makes its money off of Office licenses. It can start a new company and pour money into it. And it obviously has an impact on the market and the ability for companies to survive. I just, I see them getting slapped with the same roles that everybody else is getting. I might even say I'm okay with that. I mean, Rob, you and I were sort of chuckling about this whole thing before the show. I would say that there was a time where Bing was not big or powerful enough based on competitors. Bing's in a pretty different position now. But I mean, Apple saying, who even uses iMessage is just absolutely ludicrous. You have a lot of options, have a lot of options, but no, this doesn't play. Every teen, three quarters of the teens in North America. Yeah, iMessage, you know, Apple trying to get iMessage off the hook is laughable, especially when the CEO of Apple has recently said that if you wanna use iMessage by your mother and iPhone, it's like, well, you're making those kind of statements. You can't then go and argue, oh, well, we're really not that big because we only have billions of people who use us, not multiple billions of people who use us. I mean, how many years has it been now that we talk about like, ooh, blue or green bubble? If you're on a group chat, iMessage breaks everything. Wouldn't it be nice if Apple played, you know, nicer with other standards? We've been talking about this for a long time. Apple knows what kind of market value it has and how it sort of kept many of us in the clutches. Whether we're fine with it or not, we're still there. You know, anytime you've got a company with 60 billion and relatively ready cash reserves, feel free to mock me for calling it ready cash reserves. But like, they got 60 million sitting in a bank in New York by way of a holding company in Ireland. You know what I mean? The whole scale they compete at just justifies the regulation and feel free to tweet at Patrick Norton and tell me that I am a communist and don't understand, you know, business. Well, okay, so I guess, you know, based on this conversation that we're having, I mean, do we think either Microsoft or Apple will be successful here? I mean, they have big legal teams anyway. Neither one is going to be. Being is bundled with the most popular operating system on earth. Right. They're not getting past that. iMessage is bundled and built into the most popular smartphone on earth. Now, granted, there are way more Android phones out there, but the hotness is iMessage. Just yesterday, yesterday, my daughter is telling me, Dad, I think I'm switching back to iPhone. Why are you switching back? I miss iMessage and FaceTime. You know, those are the only two reasons that she's going to, you know, completely switch back to, you know, a different platform. So she just wants to get back to iMessage. So Apple has no shot here. Like I said, you know, Tim Cook, the stuff that he said about it, you know, someone's getting paid a lot of money to at least try to fight this fight, but it is not a winning battle that I think they're going through here. I mean, it's funny, right? Because I understand how they could argue that, you know, this isn't a gatekeeper. This is just something we bundle with the operating system. You know, our app store, yeah, that's a gatekeeper. The operating system, that's a gatekeeper, but it's, you know, I just, you have to laugh anytime of year. And even if they are right and prove so in court, you know, it's still just strange for them to be like, no, no, no, we're so small. We're so tiny. We're not that important. Yeah, yeah. But I can also... Look at all the WhatsApp users. They don't need us. It's like, well, a Dr. Rob's daughter who's like, you know, I kind of miss my friends. I want FaceTime and iMessage. And the blue bubble. Yeah. I mean, it's really, you know, you look at the rules, right? It has a, the criteria will be met if a company has a strong economic position, significant impact on the internal markets active in multiple EU companies. Check has a strong intermediation position, meaning that it links a large user base to a large number of businesses. Check has or is about to have an entrenched and durable position in the market. Check meaning that it's stable over time if the company met the two criteria above and each of the last three financial years. So, you know, I feel like you have blanket coverage of both Microsoft and Apple just looking at the basic criteria for the Digital Markets Act. Well, we will be following the story, but meanwhile, Rob, tell us more about a study that might make you wanna stay online a little bit more. So yes, a really interesting study of 18,154 older adults born before 1966 was published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, showing that the regular internet users had approximately half the risk of dementia compared to their same age peers who do not use the internet regularly. This difference remained even after controlling for education, ethnicity, sex, generation, and signs of cognitive decline at the start of the study. Participants using the internet between six minutes and two hours per day had the lowest risk of dementia. You just think about six minutes to two hours a day, half, that is statistically significant. Two to four hours, does it start becoming more likely to have? You're likely to post something on Facebook, you'll regret. In a whole cat. No, this is actually kind of interesting to me, especially because we talk a lot and we have recently on the show because there have been a lot of studies on the younger set. And what is social media doing to the youth? Is it making you feel worse about yourself? Is it leading to depression, et cetera, et cetera? And that is all still really, really interesting stuff to study, but when it comes to older people who have either perpensity or already have dementia to be able to, I don't know, I guess feel more in line with the inner workings of the world that kind of surprised me, honestly. The study surprised me. I mean, there's a history of dementia on one side of my family and some fairly dramatic and depressing stuff that came out that anybody who's dealt with dementia, you have my utmost sympathy and my thoughts are with you if you're dealing with somebody right now because it's utterly brutal, right? But it's kind of fascinating just the idea that this is good, you know what I mean? Your brain's staying active. It's not the only thing you want your seniors or yourself to be doing, but man, that's a huge, huge, huge difference. Half the risk. I mean, there's a lot of things I do to half the risk of heart disease or lung disease or cancer or, you know. Of course, yeah. Tell me what to eat. Tell me what not to do. You know, the kind of thing. Just a few more notes on the study if you're interested. The study author Gowan Cho plus their colleagues, we're looking at the risk of developing dementia. So this wasn't necessarily how it can help people with dementia, but also how it could stave off dementia. 65% of participants were already regular internet users. 35% were non-regular users. Maybe they, you know, got online every so often type thing. 21% changed their internet use habits during the study period. 53% didn't. The remaining 26% either just dropped out of the study or maybe died during the follow-up period because they were elderly or they developed dementia during the study. 5% of participants developed dementia during the study period. 8% died or experienced another event due to which they were excluded from further analysis. So your mileage may vary, obviously, when it comes to this. It does seem though, like preliminary numbers show that if you are either experiencing dementia or maybe have some warning signs of getting there to be online, I guess, not unlike reading a newspaper or, you know, I don't know, having somebody tell you the, you know, the, you know, the scenes of the day from the earth that you might not have ever heard about otherwise or maybe even watching television, you know, those all would contribute to you not feeling kind of alone and your brain going to mush. I wouldn't be shocked if you would see phone makers and like the AARP here in the United States, another organization similar around the world, you know, knowing that this study is so significantly impactful, I mean, half, you use your phone, get on the internet for six minutes to two hours a day and your chances of getting dementia are cut in half. That is a promotable, you know, concept. You know, basically if you are a baby boomer or older, use your phone regularly and it helps you, you know, or keeps you from getting dementia, that is something I think you're gonna see branding and commercials around and then not too distant future. Yeah, I mean, when you look at some of the Alzheimer's sites, right, it's physical activity, eating healthy, don't smoke, don't drink, you know, basically reduce your alcohol consumption and stay mentally and socially active and it's kind of, wow, I never would have, you know, we always, and to go back to what you were saying earlier, Sarah, we tend to think of cell phones as being isolating or this, you know, gateway to doom-scrolling and self-hatred and, you know, whatever you want to ascribe to it, you know, I was on Instagram and now I want to, you know, stop eating for the next six months. Like it's always so peculiar, I think, at this point when we realize that these can actually be positive tools for, you know, things other than routing around traffic in the middle of LA on a bad Tuesday. I mean, it definitely depends on, you know, who you're, you're, you're, exactly, right, right. I mean, if you are looking at, I don't know, self-harm stuff as a young person on Instagram, like not gonna help you if you're, you know, 75 and older, but there is something about, I guess, taking part in just, I don't know, the way that the world's still working and feeling like you're not left out. And I think that counts for a lot. I mean, I feel like that way about myself, I know we're doing the show, so it's a little bit of a silly thing for me to say, but, you know, when I check out too much, sometimes I do that for mental reasons, I also feel like, ah, you know, I lose a lot as well because you learn things online. True that. True that. Well, speaking of learning things, in this season of Know a Little More, Tom Merritt is gonna break down a pivotal moment in tech history, which you might not have known about, the mother of all demos. How many technologies we use today that were introduced in 1968 and why it took over a decade for them to even go mainstream all the season on Know a Little More, check out the Patreon page at patreon.com slash know a little more to find out a little more. I was gonna do a salt and pepper voice and say, let's talk about sound, baby, which I just did, but it sucked. So sorry about that. I don't want to make this weird. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Patrick, we are talking about soundbars though, and I'm in the market for one because I left my old soundbar at my old apartment because I just couldn't handle it anymore. And I want to know what the new hotness is. Oh my goodness. Okay, so soundbars are an easy and relatively inexpensive way to upgrade your TV sound. Their quality isn't the same for all types of models. You know, I'm just gonna lay out a few things here. One, the speakers in your TV probably suck. You know, as much as I love the acoustic surface audio plus technology that Sony built into some of their OLED TVs where the screen actually, there's an actuator that moves the screen and the screen actually has a speaker. It is a speaker sending sound to you where you're staring. It's pretty glorious. But generally speaking, TV speakers pretty much suck compared to speakers outside the TV. Whether they're a pair of old gaming speakers, a soundbar or a full on 7.2.4 surround sound system with 11 speakers and a pair of subwoofers. You know, I also, in case anyone hasn't noticed, I'm a home theater nerd. I have a screen in the basement or the Rumpus Room or whatever you wanna call it. So having all two speakers is perfectly fine for me. The four over, the surround sound, you know what I mean? There's a lot of cables that have been pulled in my house. And, you know, my inner nerd is happy to hang speakers and run cable and tune the AVR and tune the room. And it's a hobby, right? A lot of people just want better sound without it being a hobby or paying a lot of money or they can't put speakers in the ceiling or they just don't want these giant boxes hanging out whatever room the television screen is. You know, there are advantages to discrete home theater speakers, right? You know, a speaker, a center channel, a left, right in the rear surrounds. You know, especially the center channel is gonna give you, in some cases, clearer vocals, a little more intensity and more kind of space from the utmost immersive effects. A quality soundbar is gonna get you alarmingly close to that with a lot less cable. And, you know, I'll just flat out say that sound is 50% or more of the experience. You know, if you're watching your favorite television program, if you're watching a new movie, it is amazing what sound designers have been doing and continue to do, especially with the object-based audio and Atmos. You saw, you've watched the video, you saw a picture flash up a second ago and you literally have 128 channels of audio and that lower right-hand corner, it's essentially a box and you can steer the sounds around that box. Now, the other thing you can do that Netflix does, for example, you may notice at the end of a Netflix, there's like a 20-minute video in three minutes of credits and like another 20 minutes of voice credits for people around the world. One of the things that Atmos allows companies like Netflix to do is to swap out different sense of audio for different countries very quickly and easily, which is something you really couldn't do with traditional channels of audio. So in any case, when you get a soundbar, you're getting anywhere from a couple of stereo speakers that sit in front or above depending on how they're set up, your television set, you may get a six-foot-wide soundbar, maybe two and a half feet wide. It should have at least three speakers, so it gives you a better center channel and then a left and a right channel. They come with discrete rear channels in some cases. There are a billion of them out there. Vizio's very famous for them. LG's doing them. Sansom's doing them. Polk Audio's doing them. Almost every major audio manufacturer has some variation on a soundbar. So for about $160, a really great entry-level product to look at is Vizio's V-Series, the V5186. It's a 5.1.2 system. Basically it has a big soundbar in the front and a couple of rear channels and a subwoofer. You know, you're talking about thousands of four-point-something star reviews. It's about $250, and the next gen, the follow-up to that is the V51XJ6 that's available at Amazon. You know, like four and a half stars, 5,146 reviews. That's something that people are really happy with. Is it the equivalent of $10,000 for the surround speakers in an AVR? No, but it's really good. Now, the thing about those 5.1.2 systems, they aren't doing any Atmos. And something, a nice upgrade from that that I've heard that's pretty impressive is Vizio's M-Series, the Elevate 5.1.2. Sports Dolby Atmos. Depending where you're shopping, it's $500 to $600. So what it has inside of there is at the end of the soundbars, they call them adaptive height speakers, and they rotate up or forward, depending on what you're listening to. So rotate it up. They behave like Atmos-enabled speakers. They bounce audio off your ceiling for that immersive effect. There are a lot of soundbars that are doing that where they have the Atmos-enabled speakers. I will say your ceiling needs to be flat. It needs to not have a popcorn ceiling. It needs to not be a cathedral ceiling to get the audio to bounce properly on that. And the reason is because the audio will just be bouncing in weird ways. Yeah, you basically, yeah, you want it to be like, you know when you see somebody strike a shot on a pool table and it hits the bumper and it ricochets? Like, that's what you want. The sound's gonna go up, it's gonna hit the ceiling, it's gonna go down to where you're sitting. When you have a, you know, if you have a cathedral ceiling, it's gonna bounce, but it's gonna go to the wrong place. If you have a popcorn ceiling or a highly textured ceiling, it's going to essentially diffuse it. And diffusion is great if you're creating recording studio. It is not what you want if you're trying to get the, you know, the at-most enabled speaker thing going for your surround sound. So there is a- What is your, I know we were both talking about needing a soundbar. What is your soundbar situation currently if there is any? So two years ago, I built this podcast studio and it's more than what you can see right now. I've actually got, you know, couch and chairs and a nice big Samsung 85 inch TV and I never hooked up good speakers and I never bought a soundbar for it because I very rarely watch TV. And what the reason is because, and I think you mentioned this is that, you know, Patrick, is that sound is probably half of your viewing experience. Well, up in my family room, I've got all the speakers, I've got everything up there. It's just when you're watching the movie, it's just way better to watch when you've got all that sound equipment. Down here, I would like to have more because what's gonna honestly happen probably tomorrow, I'm gonna have an accident and go buy an Xbox because I wanna play start, you know, this new game. So I wanted to sound great. And like right now, I've just got the speakers built into the Samsung TV. The TV is beautiful to look at, but it sounds like you're listening on a cell phone, like an old cell phone when you're listening to audio on it. So they're trying so hard, right? But you literally, as televisions get thinner, you have less and less volume to work with. And honestly, having some volume for your speaker enclosures makes it much easier to create better sounding audio. You know, it's miraculous that your television sounds as good as it does, but it still sounds pretty awful compared to even a set of 10-year-old computer speakers you bought off somebody's yard sale. I will say, if you have some time, Brent Butterworth over at Wirecutter, he did a big, like he said, a blind jury testing. He did a big roundup this summer, this article live in June. It's the best sound bar. Definitely worth taking a look at. I have some options. I haven't heard that he highly recommends. He is a very serious, he has an audio file, though, you know, I could call him that. He is an audio professional. And a member of the Audio Engineering Society is probably literally benchmarked more subwoofers than just by anybody else on the planet. And he's got some really nice suggestions in there. And there's a couple of great articles in there to think about for like what you're doing and how if it works in your room and what your options are. And so there's some very, very good stuff over there. It's called the bestsoundbar over at wirecutter.com. Well, Patrick, we can't think of anyone better than you to tell us about what our options are. Thank you for all the tips and let us all have better audio in El Fruturo. Hear all the experience. That's right. It's true though. You know, you can say, I don't really care. But once you have it, go back. You know, I was like, I don't need an extra, you know, the seven, nine, 11, you know, with the multiple rear height channels, they didn't do a thing for me. I will say that the first time I heard a demo of Atmos over at Dolby Labs, it was mind blowing. You know, and immersive is a good word for it. It's like, if you haven't been to Atmos Theater, find one. And we've got some Atmos coming into TCL TVs early next year, which will be kind of exciting. So we'll force you to come back and tell us more about that. Deal. All right. Over in the mail bag, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. This one came in from Andy from the woods of New Hampshire. That's where Andy lives. Andy said, love the confusing acronym discussion in GDI 4595. Rob and I were talking about LOL. Sometimes it means lots of love, depending on who your parent is. Andy says, I work in emergency medicine. And I still run into LOL all the time in notes from dispatch in handoff reports from day to night shifts and on chart notes. Most commonly it's LOL fall. Now, this is a fun low stakes example of the difficulty of acronyms in healthcare. And I frequently use it as a training topic. You might be like, what is Andy talking about? Well, in this case, little old lady came in due to a fall, LOL fall. So long, long, long, long time ago, I actually wasn't EMT. You know, like right at the end of college, right moving into grad school. And this is actually something this story reminded me. I remember this, you know, LOL, you know, little old lady fall was something that was used way back in the, you know, in the mid 90s. Just, yeah, to save time, it wasn't supposed to be like funny or kitschy. Right. Yeah. Well, how about that? You know, we learned something new about you every day, Rob. Yes. Patrick Norton, thank you so much for being with us today. So let folks know we're gonna keep up with everything you know about soundbars and beyond. Boy, I'm technically still on the Twitters, which is I guess the X, which is a name I have difficulty saying because it's named my favorite band. And now I'm wandering off into a pointless digression at Patrick Norton on Twitter or you can catch up with me at avxl.com or search for AVXL on your favorite podcatcher. It's a podcast I do with Mr. Robert Herron. And Patron, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet, where we'll talk about Google's new Android Fit. Oh, and what a fit it is. Just a reminder though, we do the show live. Monday through Friday, you can catch it live. 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Hope you can make it. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.