 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Mike McLaughlin, Miss Music Teacher, and James C. Smith. Coming up on DTNS, Sony promises more PS5s and a plan beyond game consoles. Will we all take air taxis in 2024, and Proton Mail takes on Google? Will you help them win? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 26, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, we've got nothing but good news for you today. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Well, the rumors were true. Broadcom announced it had tends to acquire VMware in a $61 billion deal. While Broadcom has made acquisitions to expand into the software market in the last four years, this deal would triple its software sales to about 45% of total revenue. Not special, Broadcom. Pretty much everyone's own VMware at this point. Twitter agreed to a $150 million settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it misrepresented the security and privacy of user data between May 2013 and September 2019. During that time, it did not disclose that email addresses and phone numbers collected in order to secure accounts also happened to be used to aid advertisers. They stopped doing that in 2019, but they paid for it now. Also in Twitter news, SEC filings show that Elon Musk put up another $6.25 billion of equity in backing his acquisition of Twitter, his proposed acquisition, increasing his total equity in the purchase to $33.5 billion. And the Wall Street Journal says Musk is no longer going to rely on margin loans that are backed by Tesla shares. Remember, there was a whole deal about how this could tank Tesla stock. Tesla's not part of it anymore. Remember when we told you about Amazon Style? That's where you can order clothing on the phone or scan clothes in a store and then have them automatically ready for you in a dressing room or for purchase? Well, Amazon Style has finally opened in Glendale, California in the Los Angeles area. Oh, go get them. Three tech companies in China beat expectations, but the expectations were low. First the bad news, then the good news for each. Alibaba's revenue was the slowest growth since 2014, and that's the second quarter that it has set a record for its slow growth. However, it still rose 9% and that beat expectations. Baidu net income fell 22%, but sales rose 1%, mostly led by its cloud AI business, and that helped counteract slow sales in mainland China. Oh, and Baidu's streaming unit Aichi posted its first profit. Finally, Lenovo's predicted shipments would fall because of chip shortages in the coming year. But for now, the good news is Q4 profit was up 58%, and it led the global PC market with a 23% share. Bloomberg sources say that Apple will not raise its production target of iPhones from the 220 million it produced last year. Analysts had expected Apple to order around 240 million units. iPhone sales have been flat to start the year, so it may be Apple adjusting for a down market for phones overall, as well as dealing with supply constraints. All right. Let's talk a little more about this. The Sony news. Sony, Sony giving us hope. What are they? Yeah, well, one does hope. Sony gave a wide-ranging briefing to investors on its game and network services segment touching on the future of the PS5 and moving beyond the console. Starting with gamers biggest question that relates to the PS5. Why can't I buy one? Where are they? We have money. We want to give you money. Give us a PS5, Sony. What's the deal? Yeah, the PS5 is actually lagged behind sales of the PS4 in 2021, which shouldn't happen because Sony itself says that when you have enough consoles to sell, it takes 82 minutes to sell 80,000 PS5s and nine days to sell the same number of PS4s, but Sony isn't getting enough chips for the PS5, so there aren't always PS5s to sell. That is supposed to change, though. Sony promised investors it expects to sell 56% more PS5 units in fiscal 2022 up to 18 million units and that the PS5 will pass the PS4 in sales next year. It's going to happen. To get there, they're going to have to mitigate the supply chain effects from lockdowns in China and the war in Ukraine. Sony says it's going to source from multiple suppliers and that it is negotiating optimized delivery routes and it thinks that it can get around both those problems. Okay, so there. Making more consoles. That's great. But another big critique has been that Sony focuses too much on consoles, so what do they say about that? Well, how's this? Sony plans to launch 12 live service franchises for games that doesn't count Destiny, which will become part of Sony when its acquisition of Bungie closes, so other franchises, which is still a lot of new live franchises. It's only announced one so far and that's MLB The Show 2022. Sony also called out an investment in Seattle's Excelbyte, which provides back-end live game services. And as for the PC side of things, Sony projects that PC game sales will more than triple this year from $80 million to $300 million. It expects that by 2025, PC and mobile games combined will make up more than half its annual first-party releases. Right now, they make up about 25%, but wait, there's more. Indeed. Virtual reality, which is actually tied to the PS5, but Sony promised more than 20 major titles will be available for the new PSVR2 at launch. And they showed a picture of Horizon Call of the Mountain in their slide about that. Now, if you're saying, great, when is it launched? They didn't tell us that or how much it's going to cost. There was talk of expanding their intellectual property beyond game platforms. They pointed to the Last of Us series on HBO, the Uncharted movie as sort of examples of where they want to go more often. And to wrap things up by saying this, it would transform, quote, PlayStation's current console-centric approach to a future where large elements of our community extend beyond the console. So Microsoft's already doing this. They're like Xbox everywhere. You're on a phone. You're on a PC. You're on an Xbox itself. You're going to get your Xbox games. That's their promise. And people have said Sony needs to catch up. PlayStation Direct is a small step that way, but Sony's saying we got more steps to come. But I think they're being conservative, Justin. They're protecting their lead with consoles while taking tippy-toe steps toward the future. Yeah, because they make money with consoles. That's how they make money. This is their chief revenue stream. So yes, they are going to protect and they are going to prioritize consoles. You can critique them for not investing enough in the future. You can critique them for maybe that they will rue the day five years down the road when they do not have as robust a streaming platform as Xbox. But as of right now, both of those companies primarily in this space make their money by selling a box to you every few years. That's it. And for Sony, they can say, hey, look, if we had the raw materials, we could have made more money. They don't. Until that corrects itself, they will continue to have this problem. It is interesting to me that last year, 2021, the PS4 outsold the PS5 so much. Now, I know it's because the PS5 is hard to get, but it was hard to get two years ago now, right? I mean, when did the PS5 first officially launch? It was about a year, right? More than a year ago. But anyway, but it's, you know, there's, it's a friend of mine, you know, I don't know, found one on Craigslist or eBay or something, met somebody outside of a library in San Francisco, you know, paid whatever he needed to pay because he really, he really wanted the console. But, you know, I was sort of like, okay, that's an extreme case of somebody going the extra mile to get this PS5. Most people either can't do that or, you know, can't pay the premium in order to do that. It is, it is, it's, it's maybe the biggest supply chain constraint story that accurately identifies the fact that these things just can't get made and shipped fast enough. Sony would love nothing more than to sell as many PS5 as possible. You know, the whole kind of like, oh, they're hard to get. That means they're like worth more. That only goes so far. That doesn't help Sony. That helps the guy reselling it on eBay, reading your friend at the library. Yeah. I will say anecdotally, I have not heard of a friend who has a PS5 or bought one for their family that did it in a normal way. Everybody's got a crazy drumpeel story. I bought mine on Walmart. Okay, well, except Tom. I'm the exception that proves the rule because I was, I could not, I've not talked about it because I feel bad that I was like, I was able to get one like that's without having to. I mean, but like, in all seriousness, do you think it was just good timing? They got to, you know, yeah, after Christmas when everybody else was distracted and not reshopping yet and I was able to just swoop in and get one. But, but yeah, it's, to sum this up, Sony is trying to tell the investors, don't worry, the thing that makes us money now is going to get back on track and keep making us money. And don't worry, we know that consoles aren't the future. We have a plan for the future. Well, speaking of the future, as we see the slow but steady spread of commercial autonomous taxi services in various places across the US and China, even Europe, the next trend will be air taxis. We're taking it to the sky, everybody. Someday these may be autonomous, but for now, not really. We're talking electronic vertical takeoff and landing or EVTOL aircraft with human pilots. Human pilots are still running the game here. Basically the closest thing to flying cars that's still practical for our lives. It looks like Joby Aviation, which bought Uber Elevate back in 2020, seems to be taking the lead. Oh hell yeah, Joby just got a part 135 air carrier certificate from the US FAA that lets it offer on-demand commercial air taxi service. Now, before you run down to book your flight, Joby only has two prototype aircrafts that still need to get FAA type and production certifications in order to actually, you know, operate the business. Although the company is confident it will get those, so that's good. Back in May, well in May, which is we're still in May, believe it or not, it acquired a company called Avionics. Avion with a YX at the end, which specializes in helping aviation companies secure certificates, kind of trying to get that all pushed through. It's also working with CAE, that's a flight training company on pilot training. It also thinks they can launch commercial service by 2024. Now that might be optimistic, but if it's true, that's not far away. In the meantime, it can develop its consumer-facing app and test its software with its employees currently flying a test route between San Jose and Marina, California. Marina, California is sort of near Santa Barbara for anybody who's familiar with the area. Didn't disclose what additional test routes it might add though. We do have some clues. Joby has partnerships with the parking garage operator Reef and real estate company Neighborhood Property Group to build out a network of verta ports on top of parking garages and helipads in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and New York. And it already has partnerships with SK Telecom in South Korea and ANA Airlines in Japan to launch commercial air taxi services in those countries. Tom, are you ready to vert your way? Yes. Get me to the verta port. I am ready to make my connection. It's like, tired heliports, wired verta ports. Get me to the verta ports. Exactly. My aptly written futurism. We have air taxis now, but they're old and clunky and really expensive. I can't wait for this EV tall modern way of using an app to call an only somewhat expensive air taxi to take me from the airport to my luxury hotel. I wonder what these are going to be used for at first. I remember that Uber was first used for black cars. It was used for the most expensive form of hired transportation to make it easier. I think Justin, you and I were talking about this before that you're right. This is going to be expensive to begin with this. Even if this does happen in 2024, it's not going to be available to every pocketbook. This is not going to be ride share. Right. This is going to be a luxury item for people that can afford to pay it because there's no way that you could do this at the kind of share requires everybody in the populace to basically have a car. Everybody in the populace is not going to have an EV tall. In fact, Joby only has two. So, you know, you're starting behind. But I do think that there is a market for it. Anybody who's tried to commute from San Francisco down to the South Bay where all these tech headquarters are understand that it is hell. There would be, there is a tremendous market for a lot of people who have more money than they know what to do with to take an EV tall from some parking garage in downtown San Francisco to Palo Alto or one of these surrounding environs. Where all these tech companies are. So, in places where you would otherwise be avoiding traffic and now you have alternative to a helicopter. If you were, if you were like, you know, I like taking the helicopter, but boy is it pricey. Then congratulations. The EV tall revolution is for you. Yeah. I can't believe how much I save over my private helicopter to take this EV tall from Joby. Well, I mean, but that's, you make a good point, Justin, that's sure LA, San Francisco, Miami and New York would be great, you know, places for particularly people who have money, but also people who don't want to sit in traffic to take advantage of this. But anywhere, anywhere in the world, you know, because once this once this turns into something that is proven to be a great idea, we'll see it all over the world anywhere that you got to get in the air and just go over everybody because you can't. Well, I was about to say you can't drill holes under the earth, but there are companies doing that as well. That's a whole different solution. But let's just figure out how to get out of, you know, the freeway system and, and if you, if, if, if enough people want it, then the infrastructure gets built out and then the price comes down. Yeah, but the thing is, is that if you're looking at these prototypes, they're not bosses. Right. There's a limited amount of seating that you're going to be able to do it. So I do think for the foreseeable future, and I would say probably the next 10 to 15 years, this is going to be a luxury. This is going to be a cheaper helicopter as opposed to what we would think of as a, you know, a taxi on a road. Somewhere between black car and helicopter will be the price point. And I would say closer to helicopter. Probably. Yeah. Roger. Oh, now I was going to say, you know, back in the 60s, there was late 60s, there was kind of a boom and heliports for people, for example, in Manhattan who wanted to fly out to the LaGuardia or Newark, so they get to the airport. And it was, it went pretty well until there were a couple of accidents with New York Air. And like these, whatever service comes up, it needs to be like better than spotless when it comes to safety because even one incident can shake customer faith. It's one thing to have a car that maybe doesn't run well. All right, you get to a fender bender. It's another thing. If you have an air taxi and you have an incident, that psychologically will be very impactful to the people you're trying to sell to. Don't kill people, Joby. That will help your business model. And you can have that piece of advice for free. Which is why they have to go through these certifications, right? You don't have to go through this many hoops to launch an autonomous taxi service, even as you do to launch this EVTOL. And this has a human pilot. We're not even talking about autonomous. That's also being developed. But man, they talk about partnering with companies in Korea and Japan. You know, the idea of even from Haneda, which is the closer airport in Tokyo, definitely from Incheon to get to Seoul. Those are long hauls and it would be so nice to just fly up above it all. Certainly true in LA as well. So yeah, I hope that this actually launches. I hope Rez Roger rightly reminds us it stays safe. And I hope that it gets scaled to where the cost comes down and it can be affordable for most of us. I hope that while Tom is verting from the airport into downtown Seoul, he is checking the DTNS subreddit. And there he will see conversations like we've seen over the past day. Reacting to RW Nash posting the news yesterday that Proton Mail is rebranding as Proton and going head to head with Google as a privacy focused alternative for personal productivity tools like email, calendar and more. The newly dubbed Proton offers four services under one unified login, mail, calendar VPN and the all new beta of Proton Drive. Proton also introduces three plans, which you can review and an all new domain name Proton.me. Hey Tom, why don't you tell us about these plans they got? Yeah, I feel like I'm on QVC for Proton suddenly. But the free plan expands storage from 500 megabytes to a gigabyte. You can send up to 150 messages per day. There is a cap though on the free plan. You can only have three labels and folders and you can set up one calendar and everybody gets access to basic Proton VPN for free. So that's part of that too. Basic access gives you slower speeds than the paid access of the VPN limited servers and devices. Keep in mind Proton does not serve ads. So this free tier just cost them money to offer at all. It's just a way to ease you into a paying subscription. It's subsidized by the people who pay. The first paid subscription is called Mail Plus. It's five euros a month. You get 15 gigabytes of storage, 10 email addresses, unlimited folders and labels and unlimited messages. There's no more limits on that stuff. Also supports one custom email domain and you get priority support calendars and of course the basic VPN. Finally for 12 euros a month you get Proton Unlimited. That one offers 500 gigabytes of storage, 15 email addresses, up to three custom domains, full calendar, make as many calendars as you want. You get the faster, more devices VPN and you get beta access to Proton Drive, one of their newer products. If you're wondering where you can access all of this stuff Proton has iOS apps for mail and VPN, Android apps for those plus the calendar and of course everything's available on the web. But here's the question, Tom. In a world that says it values privacy, will it value it enough to leave the free, convenient and long lasting in many cases Google accounts for free Proton accounts, let alone even paid ones. I mean, even, even though all things Proton sound very good to me, just the, the migration over and letting folks know that I have a new email address or even, you know, setting up some forwarding thing is just enough of an inconvenience that I think a lot of people would be like, that sounds good but I don't know what I have right now is working for me already. Well, I mean, obviously privacy has become more of a kitchen table issue than it was in the past where previously just nerds like us would say things like if it's free then you're the product. Advertising is something that has obviously shifted around a lot over the last even three years, but we have become more aware of it it has become more of something that people understand when ads are chasing you around the Internet, because of trackers. That being said, while people like to complain about it and an act like Facebook is using their microphone to target them with things. I don't think that it is enough by itself to get people to pay for a platform or like you said Sarah, go through the pain of migrating, but for people who are into it for proton fans for privacy. Yeah, I think this is great. Now, will that be enough to get a seat at the table for stuff like this? I think possibly, but I don't know. I think if anything it may or may not be a good model for other people to build products around. I don't know proton whatever be an acquisition target, but I do think that this is leaning into a current trend. I don't think it's enough though to say, oh, and mass people are going to be leaving Google. Yeah, I don't even know if this makes a dent in Google but you make a good point. This is enough to build a business on like I don't think proton expands because they've had a paid program before that a free program the paid program free program was even more limited. So they're loosening that up a little and they're providing a more compelling service that should make it more appealing to more people, but it's still people who are enthusiastic about privacy protection. It's not necessarily going to pull in the masses for that. I think Sarah is right. You'd have to make a big deal about how easy it is to switch provide some tools for switching because it is a great product. I use proton myself, but I don't use it as my daily driver and maybe I should. But every time I think about doing that I'm like, Okay, but then there's some work I have to do to move it over. And that's me and I know what I need to do. Somebody who's like, I don't even know how to do that. You got to make that easy if you want to have large numbers of people coming over and maybe protons like we don't need large numbers right now. We just we have enough of a business. Yeah, just get some cash flow and then enough in there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, folks, if you're feeling social, if you're like, Hey, I'm a proton male user, I don't want to let you know how great it is. Get in touch with us on the socials at DTNS show is our Twitter account and at DTNS picks with an X DTNS P I X is our Instagram account. Come by and say hi. Northwestern University created a little robot crab. You might say, how small is it? It's so small. In fact, it's half a millimeter wide. So if you've ever picked a flea off of a sock, it's smaller than that. Wow. The researchers who created it have found an easy way to control it remotely as well. So when heat is applied to the robot system, using a laser, it's thin coating of glass deforms the system shape, and it creates locomotion. When that laser is turned off, cools down quickly. If you do both in quick, in quick succession, the robot starts to walk. If you want to make it go left, the laser scans right to left vice versa to make it go right. The team says it fabricated precursors to the walking crab structures and flat planar geometries and then bonded those precursors onto a slightly stretch rubber substrate. Once the stretch substrate is relaxed, a controlled buck clean process happens that causes the crab to pop up into precisely defined three dimensional forms. Yeah, we've seen similar things to this where you like do something to make it bend and contract and that's how you can move it around. But this is a new new take on that. And popside.com was speculating this could be used in surgery to help guide medicines or guide lasers for surgery or even maybe even do small incisions and stuff like that. But these things are incredibly small. So they're going to be used for spying on me. Yeah. Yeah, the next time you see a colony of ants, you know, like kind of, you know, going around those grapes that you left on the counter laser light play around by them. Because remote control, they're not. You should have your own little laser pointer and see if you can make them turn left and right. We're like, we're imagine, you know, like when people go through surgery and sometimes it's like, sorry, but you're going to need some leeches, you know, to like get blood out of your body. Everyone's like, okay, I'll do it. It's like, you're going to need the little robots to go in there and help out. All right. Or you're going to need leeches to get the little robots out of your body. Yeah. Or the robots to get the lea, yeah, or, yeah. Come on leeches, you're done. What's up with the leeches? What is this? The middle ages? All right. Let's check out the mailbag. What do we got? Oh, let's do it. James C. Smith from Irvine, California wrote in and said, the discussion of Blackberry in the 2012 rewind bonus episode, which is special for patrons, patrons. Hopefully you've heard it. If not, it's available to you and non patrons. It's very fun. If you'd like to become a patron, James C. Smith said, it made me think of this building in Irvine. And I don't know what they do inside, but to this day it's still called the Blackberry building. Every time I drive by it, it makes me wonder what goes on in there. Well, I found an article in the Irvine standard that says they're protecting privacy, but yeah, it's still Blackberry. Blackberry is still a company. Blackberry is a security company. They're a vendor of privacy software to banks and insurance companies and even governments. And you don't hear about them because their stuff is for banks and governments. It's not consumer stuff anymore, but they're doing all right. I mean, they're not killing it like they were back in the early 2000s when everybody was using a Blackberry. But yeah, James is responding to us talking about those days back in 2012 when Blackberry was still a player. And it is a player just in an entirely different arena, I guess. It reminds me of in Oakland, one of the biggest coolest buildings is the Ask.com building, which there was a great article about several years ago talking about how much of a skeleton staff actually still works at Ask.com. It effectively makes money just being a premium domain. The board of directors meets once a year. They decide we're going to just keep kind of being a website that makes X amount of money. They all shake hands and then leave. Wow. But their name's still on the building, right? Still on the building. That's kind of crazy. And the whole building is Ask.com? Oh, I don't think the whole building. You would think another company within the building would be like, you know... We have a lot more floors in this building. But yeah, maybe that's a sweetheart lease. You know, it got one of those long lease deals back in the Dock.com days. Someone should ask Dock.com how they got it. Yeah. Well, thank you, James, for writing in. Thank you to everybody who writes us in. We love getting your emails. We love feedback. If you have questions, you have comments, you have ideas for future things, we might talk about feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send those e-mails. Thank you to Justin Rubber Young for being with us today. Justin, what's been going on with you? I got a new podcast because I'm not doing enough of them and it's called We're Not Wrong. It is a round table featuring myself of the Politics Politics Podcast, Andrew Heaton of the political orphanage and Jen Briney of Congressional Dish. You can go find it wherever you find your podcast, a new episode going up today dealing with the very, very grim and unfortunate news happening in Texas as well as the Young Thug RICO trial. Ah, Young Thug and Gunna. And Gunna. They got RICO'd. Yeah. It is one of the most insane. One of the weirdest things I read on TMZ. Yeah. There is a trial that involves several rappers that is, if you're not familiar with RICO, that is how you take down mobsters. And they are heavily using lyrics from their songs as evidence, which is fascinating to me. Fascinating indeed. Well, congrats on the new podcast. Yeah. If you haven't subscribed, do it now. I also want to extend a special thanks to Kelly Murphy, who's a top lifetime supporter for DTNS. Thank you, Kelly, for all the years of support. Thank you, Kelly. Yay. Thank Kelly. Kelly, Kelly, Kelly for press. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day. Internet rolls right in after we're done with DTNS, and it's available at patreon.com. If you haven't gotten it and you want to hear us talk about all sorts of things, you can. We're live Monday through Friday on this year's show, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC is when we start. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. And we're back tomorrow with Allison Sheridan and Len Peralta. Join us if you can. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.