 Coming up on DTNs, Patrick Norton is here to help us find hope in the hunt for GPUs. Amazon is now the third biggest ad company in the U.S., and how much Apple thinks its in-app payment system is worth. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 4th, 2022, in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Snowy Dogtown, STL. I'm Patrick Norton. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about the streaming gymnastics of watching the Olympics on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. You can find that at patreon.com slash DTNs, made possible in part by our top patrons, including Philip Less, Daniel Dorado, and John Atwood. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google announced two seemingly nice things. Workspace Essentials is going to have a free tier, but just for the productivity tool suite. Sheets, slides, and docs, 15 gigs of storage, and Google Meet for free. You don't get Gmail. Google also announced a new repairability program in the U.S. to help students fix Chromebooks. They've got a website set up for the program. So far, listing models from Lenovo and Acer, they want to expand that as they go along, and repair guides specifically show repairs that will not void the original equipment manufacturer's warranty, which is good. Hold on. I'm going to look at that. I'll be right back. Oh, my goodness. Twitter said it expanded its test of downvoting replies to a global audience with a test soon available on the web, iOS, and Android. Users do not see downvotes publicly. They're used by Twitter to algorithmically show relevant replies. Twitter found that its initial downvoting test, the feature, quote, improves the quality of conversations on Twitter. Alex Kipman is the technical fellow. That's a title. He's also a technical fellow, but he's literally, his title is technical fellow. He runs Microsoft's HoloLens division. So he tweeted on Friday, don't believe what you read on the internet. Hashtag HoloLens is doing great. And if you search said internet, they also said we had canceled HoloLens too, which last I checked, we shipped with success. So yay, HoloLens. He didn't write yay, HoloLens. I'm writing that. But yeah, yesterday we reported on the insider information that the HoloLens was in trouble. Alex Kipman says, no, it's not. So picked who you want to believe. OK, in response to reports of harassment occurring in Meta's Horizon World's VR platform, I'm going to pause there for a moment. Meta has turned on a, quote, personal boundary feature by default in both worlds and the Horizon venues event service. This prevents avatars from getting closer than a virtual four feet. Although you can still high five and fist bump feature still allows you to move past people so it can't be used to block entrances. And thus our relationship with the metaverse begins at arms length. The Washington Post reports that the US Federal Reserve in Boston released the technical specifications of how a digital dollar, a.k.a. Project Hamilton would work if approved by Congress. This isn't a recommendation. This is just the tech specs. It's based on the open source open CBDC system. If you want to find out how that works, go find it on GitHub. It's there for everybody to poke around with. The system could handle more than 1.7 million transactions a second, settle payments in less than two seconds and operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So if it were to ever be put in place, it would be quite an improvement on the speed and availability of the current system. All right, let's talk a little more about Amazon. They had a mixed Q4, but it was mostly good. Sales were up 9.4 percent, although that's the first quarter of single digit growth since 2017 for Amazon. Profit was way above expectations. Earnings per share were $5.80. They had expected $3.57. A big part of that was Amazon cashing in on the IPO of electric vehicle maker Rivian. Amazon owned 22.4 percent of Rivian before the IPO. For Q1, Amazon is dampening expectations. Their guidance is they'll make somewhere between 112 and 117 billion this quarter. That's below the 120 billion that analysts thought they'd say. But unlike Meta, Amazon was able to avoid a drastic negative reaction to their earnings because in addition to the huge cloud revenue numbers they got, AWS did great. Amazon also broke out its advertising revenue for the first time. So we know specifically that ad revenue for Amazon grew 32 percent year over year to 9.7 billion. You know, a company that's doing hundreds of billions, 9.7 billion is a slice, but it's not the majority slice yet. Still, that makes Amazon the third largest U.S. advertising business behind Alphabet and Meta. So by comparison, 9.7 billion for Amazon's ad business. Google ad revenue is 61.2 billion. Facebook's was 32.6 billion. So Amazon is probably not going to jump right into second place anytime soon. But ads and cloud are doing great. So Amazon has a plan to boost retail revenue, which is you pay more. The cost of Amazon Prime. That's the plan. If case you're not familiar, that gives you free shipping. In other words, you don't have to pay additional shipping costs. You pay the yearly plan fee. You also get video streaming. You get some ebook stuff, Amazon music. There's actually a lot in the Amazon Prime membership that a lot of people don't realize they have access to. All of that is going to rise from being one hundred nineteen dollars a year to one hundred thirty nine dollars a year. If you prefer to pay monthly, it's going to go from twelve ninety nine to fourteen ninety nine a month. The rise goes into effect February 18th for new subscribers. And if you're an existing subscriber, the first renewal date after March 25th, we'll see you get the new price for context. Amazon Prime started at seventy nine dollars a year in two thousand five is a screaming deal back then. It increased to ninety nine dollars in twenty fourteen one hundred nineteen dollars in twenty eighteen. And now it's at one hundred thirty nine dollars or will be shortly. Prime video, I mentioned, is part of that also can be purchased separately. If you don't want the rest of the Amazon Prime benefits, you can just get Prime video for eight ninety nine a month. And it's worth pointing out that's not changing. Eight ninety nine a month will stay the price of Prime video. But it's I mean, it's interesting to note that Amazon continues to become a big ad player and we should start thinking of it as an ad company, the way we think about Facebook and Google. But but Patrick, I think most of us are more concerned with the pocketbook hit if we're Amazon Prime subscribers. You know, it was it was a spirited debate on good date internet around this. And one of the things is the the the the frequency is increasing slightly, right? It was like what, nine years for the for the initial price. Four years. The frequency of the price increases. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like nine four three. How are we counting that four nine four four? Yeah, it's twenty two. Yeah, it's twenty twenty two, not twenty twenty one. I'll figure that out eventually. But the thing that struck me is it's been striking me a lot in the last six months is I'm buying a lot fewer things on Amazon because there are so many other places that have equivalent or better prices, including a lot of brick and mortar places best by Tarjade, some others. So it's it's been I'm I'm curious at what point I'm curious at what point it's going to stop being the value that it has traditionally been for me. Yeah, me too. Because I I know a lot of people see price increase and they immediately get mad. I get that. That's that's going to be a normal reaction. I try. I have cultivated over the years to be more rational about it and say, I'm not going to take it personally that you raise the price. Is it still worth it? Right. Is it still worth it? It's seventy nine dollars a year back in two thousand five when Eileen signed us up and I was like, I don't know. Should we pay for it? It immediately made sense. Just just on shipping savings alone that one hundred thirty nine dollars. It could still make sense if I was still buying at the old rate. It probably still makes sense for me now. But it's a closer calculation because I, too, Patrick, have been buying fewer things on Amazon. I go to Chewy. I go to Home Depot. And it's not just a principled thing. I'm finding things not available on Amazon or available at very high prices from third party sellers that are gouging on Amazon. And it's a better deal to go to Lowe's to get a plastic Christmas tree than it is to buy it on Amazon. I will. Essentially, Amazon has shifted the market, right? Because, you know, at seventy nine dollars in two thousand five, you know, that could be, you know, purchasing a half dozen. They have just changed the way we think about, you know, paying for shipping on things. You know, if you don't have free shipping, it's hard to be competitive with Amazon. And that was before shipping prices started to get really out of control in the last four or five years. So it's, you know, I like the idea that Amazon has a lot of competition. I am surprised that Amazon isn't doing what it traditionally does, which is slashing and burning to be more competitive. But apparently they want to keep Wall Street happy. And, you know, they got to do what they got to do. I mean, we should we should save what I'm about to say for the GPU conversation, because it fits in there, too. Shipping is less cheap than it used to be, right? That's a big part of this. Speaking of prices going up, we have an early sample of how Apple is going to deal with alternative payment system. If that becomes the norm, if you're new to the story, Apple is fighting this battle on multiple fronts where governments are trying to force them to allow third parties to process payments in apps on the iOS app store. Here's a sample of the fights they're going through. A U.S. judge in the Epic versus Apple case ruled that Apple should allow links to alternative payment systems. However, Apple successfully got that order stayed while they appeal it so they don't have to do it while they appeal that order. Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service also wants Apple to let developers tell users about alternative payment options. Same thing. Either put code in there that says, hey, you could pay elsewhere on the web or a link. Apple's fighting that one, too. Both of these just involve links out to the web or descriptions in the apps. We're not talking about in-app systems. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee just sent a bill to the floor of the U.S. Senate called the Open Markets Act. It does a lot of things, but among the things it does, it would make it U.S. law to require third-party payments in app stores be allowed. So that would be in apps, not just links out. Korea already passed a law like that last year requiring app stores of Apple's size. Their law was targeted at Google, but it covers Apple to allow third-party payment systems in app stores. In January, Apple submitted its plans to comply to the KCC, but it did not make the details public. Only that there would be a charge even if you're doing a third-party system. You're not going to get away from paying Apple something. And Apple said it would be less than the 30% cut it takes. But now we kind of know what they're thinking. We have an example of what that might look like. Of how much less you will pay with a third-party payment processing system. Apple said in Korea, it's going to be less than 30%, but we are going to make you pakes. We're still running the app store. So in December, the Netherlands authority for consumers and markets responded to a complaint from Match Group, a company that does all the dating apps. Ordering Apple to let dating apps, just dating apps in the Netherlands, just in the Netherlands, offer third-party payment systems in their iOS apps. And Friday, Apple posted additional details on its effort to comply with that order. Dating apps in the Netherlands can choose to link out to an alternative payment system or offer an alternative in-app payment flow. So think PayPal or some such thing within the app to give you a choice. You can you pay through Apple or you can pay through this other way. To do that, they're going to have to call an Apple API. They're going to have to warn customers that they're leaving an Apple-controlled system. Like, you know, you're going outside the wall to garden now and you're still going to have to pay Apple 27% of whatever you collect through that alternate method. That amount will be based on reporting by the developer. So the developer will say, this is how many payments we processed from our iOS app. They'll send that to Apple. Apple will invoice them. They'll pay 27%. Apple says, quote, this is a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities. In other words, Apple is trying to say that actual payment processing in the Apple store is worth 3% of in-app payments and curation, listing, store maintenance, fraud and abuse prevention, all the rest of the things that it still has to do is worth 27%. Yeah. It's having created the market that's still worth 27. Part of me is giggles every time I see something like this because it's just Apple turtles all the way down. Confidence. This is what our market is worth by all means. Gilmore 69 is like, I'm sure they'll all be honest with that number. Most of them will. I know that's the knee-jerk reaction is like people going to lie. They won't. They won't want to risk of getting audited and getting in trouble. Sure. Will there be some bad actors try to fudge it? They will. Probably will get somebody caught. Probably will have a blow up story about that at some point. But most companies will play by the rules. That won't be the issue. It will be that is the issue will be like 27%. Is that is that fair? Is that realistic worth jumping through all of these hoops? And that's what Apple is. They go like, you know what, just say three percent. Yeah, I feel like this will not satisfy any of the governments involved in this process. Just how fast it forget the Netherlands. If this is what they do in Korea, if this is what they do in the U.S. and elsewhere, how fast will the lawsuit be filed that says that that is an unfair practice? I'm sure it's already been filed. Although part of the problem in Epic is that the judge was like, it's not a monopoly, but they should, you know, we do think there's a legal reason for them to let you link out whether they can charge for that. That was left as a possibility. So I think Apple has an even stronger case to say like, OK, we won't stop you from letting people know there's another way to pay, but we'll charge you for that. We're running an app store after all. And then what they charge that becomes a harder thing to argue against. Yeah, I mean, it's they're going to charge what the market will bear. And they're a for-profit company. And I can't really argue with them, you know, you're free to leave the marketplace. You can argue that you don't think it's fair, but I don't think you can argue that they don't have that they don't have the right to try it to do it. Right. Yeah. Well, back in August, Blizzard said it had, quote, multiple mobile free to play Warcraft experiences and they're now in advanced development. That was in August Thursday. Blizzard referred to mobile Warcraft again in its earnings call is Blizzard bringing out a mobile version of Warcraft. That seems to be the headline we're seeing in a lot of places. So we asked Scott Johnson to tell us what Blizzard actually said, what we actually know and what it actually might mean. Hey, Tom and DTNS crew, this is Scott Johnson, your Wednesday guy. I wanted to pipe in real quick about this news that World of Warcraft might be coming to mobile, at least if you believe the headlines. That's what the news is. It might be a little bit more complicated than that. The actual quote from Blizzard was or from the earnings call this was taken from says Blizzard is planning substantial new content for the Warcraft franchise in 2022, including new experiences in World of Warcraft and Hearthstone and getting all new mobile Warcraft content into players' hands for the first time. A lot of people have been taking that quote and saying, well, that means World of Warcraft is coming entirely to to mobile either through some sort of streaming front end or the actual, you know, full blown app and some sort of mobile format. And I'm not so sure this really could be anything. They have a current mobile app that helps you manage stuff that happens in game, but it is not the game and they might just be adding new content to that. We might finally get pet battles happening on mobile or other in game content that was previously only playable when you were logged into the game. Maybe some of that or more of that can be done outside the game. I mean, I would love it if the full blown MMO was coming, but I can't imagine this would be nestled way deep down into this report and not a full blown announcement and also that it's coming out in 2022. We would have heard something about this before. This is just not how Blizzard does things. So just for clarity, I don't think full wow is coming to mobile, but a lot of headliner or headline writers, sir, think it is. And that's fine. That's what they do. It'll generate some clicks, but here's hoping something is coming more to mobile for Warcraft than ever before. Will it be the full game? We're going to have to wait and find out. So you're saying there's a chance. Actually, Scott, Scott, Scott, now we're talking earlier, he thinks that eventually they will. He's like, it's just it's just not going to be now. It's going to be it's still going to be a few years before they bring World of Warcraft to mobile. He's like, yeah, they will. At some point they will. I want to shout out to Scott's, you know, this is fine. That particular way as of saying that, which I think if any of us if I said it, not any of us, because you're a more gracious person than I am, Tom, I think, I think it would have been those rat bastards writing titles. Having been one myself, he was suggesting. I was a charge of headlines at CNET for a while. So I get it. I know that game. Yeah. But yeah, experiences is a very specific. That's a very specific word that is not nailed it with pet battles. It's going to be something like that, right? Yeah. Well, folks, don't forget this Sunday. Is Nikki Ackerman's final episode of her scientist and tech mini series. She'll be interviewing Dr. Georgi Trenchev at the University of Antwerp. He uses plasma to break down greenhouse gases. So don't miss it coming to your DTNS feed. I know a lot of you want to buy a GPU. Any of you feel like if you tried, you wouldn't have enough time, money or patience or some combination thereof to get one. Is there hope? Help us, Patrick Norton. There is no hope. No, no, no. There is hope, actually. OK, so two of the biggest announcements, CES 2022, with a new quote, affordable GPUs. AMD's $200 Radeon RX 6500 XT and NVIDIA's $250 GeForce RTX 3050. These are, you know, if they stay at these real world prices, these would be the most affordable GPUs we've seen in approximately forever in COVID time. Oh, wait, it was problematic before COVID time because of crypto mining, right? So these $200, $250 prices, several were available at MSRP, that $200, $600, $500 XT, that $250 RTX 3050, those sold out instantaneously. Oddly enough, there are still GPUs available at my local Micro Center, which I'm kind of using. It is an easy benchmark. There are several 6500 XTs that are varying in price between $260 and $300, which is staggeringly close to retail price. There are two RTX 3050s. One is for sale at $330 and one is for sale at $420. And the telling thing here is you can reserve any of the 6500 XTs, but the 3050s are limited availability, which basically means they have a bunch of inventory on 6500 XTs at AMD card. There is a reason for that. Both of these cars will do 1080p play. In terms of actual performance, 3050 is definitely the winner here. 1080p with high visual settings, Ray Terry scene is actually really interesting and fairly solid, especially if you have DLSS turned on. The 6500, they made an interesting choice AMD. They put four gigabytes of RAM on it. This is more than enough for 1080p gaming and it makes it less expensive. It makes it less interesting to crypto monitors. So it should be easier to buy from those things. But when you start looking at the settings or how they implemented everything inside of the card, it's solid for 1080p with mid to high settings. And I like what Brad Chaco said over at PC World. It requires some unorthodox tweaks. So how the card performs is gonna vary a lot with the rest of your systems, the games you play and how you play them. So short answer, if you can find one for $250, a 3050 is a great card, but it is also $100 more than the 50 series cards would have cost in the past. And it is also really not that much better than the 1600 series cards that it is kind of looking to dethrone, right? Because when people were talking about these, it's like, oh, there hasn't been a 1080p card in forever. Look at what, look at Steam, look at what people are using. Two cans in a string, ancient technology. So it was not the kind of performance jump people expected. And the thing that's kind of frustrating when you go shopping is you can, if it's like, oh, it's how much for a 3050? Well, it's a 3000 series card. It's gonna be $420. It's like, well, there are 2060s out there for not that much more. It's been really weird recently. There's a lot of... And at 420, I know 420 is the top end, but you're getting close to twice the MSRP at that point, right? Close, you're creeping up on it, right? Twice the MSRP would be $500. So there's a, you know, it's a long creep. But when you start digging into what's available... But 260 for the $200, $6500 XT just feels like a natural markup. 420 for a $250 3050, that starts to feel problematic. And like the value of getting it at the price that it's MSRP is, is no longer applicable. Like, so, I don't know. I mean, it's interesting, right? Cause, Kyle Bennett, who was the original founder of HarderCP and shut that down when he went to work for a vendor. He started blogging again recently. He did a whole big thing. And the title's really simple. The status quo is no mole. And he's, you know, and what do you think he noticed? Yeah, it's extremely sophisticated Latin. But one of the things he talks about is how GPU MSRP is just going to go away, right? Because it's hopeless. And he, I think it was the RTX, that new 12 gigabyte version of the RTX 3080. They just didn't even bother to announce an MSRP because MSRP is, they just can't, between the mining demand and the pent up gaming demands and, you know, all of the issues, the systemic issues at this point in the supply chain, which will continue to ease over the next year or two. But, you know, at this point, he feels like AMD and NVIDIA are tired of being beaten about the head and neck by reviewers or, you know, enthusiasts or influencers or, you know, gamers or basically the entire internet when they announce a card, they release a card and people can only buy the card for, you know, 1.5, two times, 333 times MSRP. I'm exaggerating a lot with that last one. MSRP is always like, this is the cheapest price you'll be lucky enough to find it, expect to pay more. It's no longer an actual price that you're going to expect to pay for most people anyway. And part of that, right, is that MSRP is based on, you know, essentially the part or the parts kit that they sell to the company that builds the card and then sells the card to the retailers. So, you know, AMD and NVIDIA don't make any more money when the MSRP goes up. So one of the things he talks about is if they strip away the MSRP, they can start charging, you know, different values or more appropriate values for their parts and we'll find out where the profit comes in, you know. Yeah, maybe could there be another price that's like average expected sale price or something like that? Oddly enough, there may be something like that, but you can go over to hardercp.com slash blog to read more about Kyle's informed speculation on that. But the short answer is, you know, because of crypto mining, because people are making money at crypto mining or, you know, more accurately, people think they're gonna be making money at crypto mining because of this pent-up gaming demand. It's gonna be a while before any of this settles down. On the upside, if you're like, I just want my kid to have a new gaming PC, you know, if 1080p is gonna cut it for you, then either one of these cards will do it. 3050 is gonna be the better of the two cards performance-wise, but not the kind of huge advantage, you know, depending on the reviewer, people are like, it blew it out of the water. Or it was, you know, we expected for the price difference to see a more impressive performance delta. But at least they're attainable. They're, they're, they're, obtainable would be even better. $300 for what should have been a 150 or $200 card is a lot more, you know, it was a lot less vicious than $1400, you know, for what would have been a $600 card in theory. So. All right, real quickly, we want to, yeah, no, I think that's extremely helpful. Folks, if you got any follow-up questions, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Real quickly, thanks to Joel Freik on our subreddit who pointed out that after nearly 60,000 votes cast in the Minnesota Department of Transportation's effort to name Snowplows, the former winning plow named plowy Mcplowface has eight new Snowplow friends joining the fleet. One for each Minnesota Department of Transportation district around the state. They include Betty White out, Scroop Dog, no more Mr. Ice Guy. And the one that caught Joel Freik's eye, Control Salt Delete. Yes. That's awesome. Yeah. So good, good, good geeky name for a snowplow in Minnesota and something to help warm you up as you laugh at it during these snowy times. All right, let's check out the mailbag Dustin Hess wrote in and said, regarding Google's retirement of the free G Suite domain name-based email, if you're not transitioning to the $6 per user per month plan, Dustin wrote, one thing to pass along to everybody else for alternatives, I was just using this for a bit of branded email. If you are using Google domains for your domain, now that's the caveat. You have to switch to using Google domains for this. That's $12 a year. There is a native email forwarding tool built into their domain DNS management tool. I set that up and will be letting these workspace accounts expire. Only works for incoming email, but that's about 99% of the value I got from this. So if you just want email to a email address at a domain name to hit your Gmail box, you can forward it. Oh yeah, actually you could forward it to any. It doesn't even have to be a Gmail account, right? You could forward it to anything through Google domains. Now, I think it's worth pointing out, your domain name provider might already do that now. You might not even have to switch to Google domains. There are lots of providers who will do domain name forwarding, or if you have a web host, often web hosts will do that. Not all of them do it, but a lot of them do it. So that's a good tip from Dustin though. If you're in the Google ecosystem and you don't mind, especially if you're on one of those free workspace accounts, you might have registered your domain name through Google anyway, that would be an easy fix for you. Thanks to our brand new bosses, Norman Lacoste Jack Wolf, just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Norman, and thank you, Jack. It's always good to get brand new patrons. Also, we got a message today, and I'm blanking now on who sent it, but it was somebody asking, well, if I'm doing a yearly patron, do I have to wait three years to get the Patreon merch that comes for the monthly patrons in three months? And I was like, no, no, that's the brilliance of it. If you do the yearly, you're locked in, you're gonna get all four of the merch items because you've already prepaid for all 12 months. So hopefully Norman and Jack can stick around long enough to take the benefits. Also, thank you, Patrick Norton. What you got going on these days? avxl.com, the podcast I host with Robert Herron, talking about home theater and audio. Got some headphone news to talk about, got some 2022 television news to talk about on this week's episode, and you can tweet me at Patrick Norton. Just in time for the Super Bowl. I'm gonna get those TV recommendations in there. We are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 21.30 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech News Show.com slash live. Jen Cutter is on the feed tomorrow with gaming news monthly. Keep an eye out for that. We have scientists in tech on Sunday and then we'll be back to talk to you for the regular DTNS on Monday. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kuntz, associate producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus One, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Jack Shid, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast adds support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show include Scott Johnson, Justin Rubber Young and Patrick Norton. Guests on this week's show included Nika Monford and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.