 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, Ms. Music Teacher, and new patrons, Preston and Carlos. Welcome! Coming up on DTNS, Apple announced its mixed reality set. Who is it for? Who will pay the $3,500 for it? Plus, new Macs and new L.S. specs. We got it all from WWDC. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 5th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from, as yet, an unnamed studio. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the very edge of Atlanta, I'm Nika Monfort. And from a little farther out from the suburbs of Atlanta, I'm Terence Gaines. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Alright folks, we got WWDC to get to, so let's get right through the other non-Apple news, the Quick Hits. Google has expanded its beta support for pass keys from standard Google accounts to include Google Workspace, meaning that companies and employees can now use the more convenient and secure option instead of passwords. Workspace administrators will have to enable it in each company, and then a pass key uses a public key cryptography and a device's own biometric security to log a user in, meaning that no password can be intercepted or taken from a database. Your login is as secure as you have made your phone or your laptop. Following Reddit's move to charge third-party apps fees for API access, several subreddits, including r slash videos, r slash reaction gifts, and r slash life pro tips, will set their communities to private for 48 hours starting on June 12th as a protest against the fees. Several hundred subreddits will participate. Reddit says its pricing is 24 cents per thousand API calls, and it thinks that should equate to less than a dollar per user per month if it's properly configured. But one of the third-party app developers, Apollo, has estimated it would cost them $2.50 per user per month, and other third-party developers have made similar estimates for their apps. Amazon announced it plans to digitize or bring online 10 million small businesses in India by 2025, estimated to generate $20 billion in export money. That would be up from around 4 million small businesses and 5 billion in exports to date. The company launched an app in India back in 2013 offering some shopping options in several local languages. Amazon also partnered with the India Post and Indian Railways to create its delivery network in the country and partnered with some neighborhood shops to provide e-commerce services. The US Securities and Exchange Commission, aka the SEC, has filed a lawsuit alleging that crypto exchange Binance, one of the big ones up there with Coinbase, has operated illegally in the United States. Among the allegations are that Binance did not implement controls on market manipulation, did not properly register itself as a broker-dealer exchange clearing agency. Binance.us is not suffering these allegations and operates separately from the rest of Binance, but the SEC alleges that Binance encouraged investors to bypass the controls that were meant to keep them from using the international version. Sony poured a little cold water on speculation that it's going to move into cloud gaming soon. CEO Kenichiro Yoshida told the Financial Times that cloud gaming technical difficulties are high. He cited cost and latency as the biggest issues, but never say never to the cloud. Sony plans to take on those challenges and Yoshida said that the PlayStation Division will study various options for streaming games such as using its own AI tool GT Sophie. Sony's been out for a while. You might recall it acquired cloud gaming company Gaikai back in 2012. Then technology from on-live also got acquired, and then Sony launched its own cloud gaming subscription service in 2014 that's now integrated with PS Plus Premium. They're still trying to work it out. Good luck Sony. Good luck. Well, Apple finally did it. They announced a mixed reality headset. It was a one more thing. They even used the one more thing. Yes. They hadn't trotted that out in a while, have they? No. Sarah, of course, you called it. It was the Apple Vision Pro. No, none of us called that. That was a big surprise. I did not call it. I don't hate the name, but no, I had no insider information on it. Yeah, none of us did. I actually like the name Apple Vision Pro running on the Vision OS. Maybe they'll get a lawsuit from Marvel. I don't know. All these reality OS leaks were false flags in that, and they were all wrong. It looks like Google, it looks like goggles. These are like ski goggles. They let you see the world around you. Also projects a picture of your eyes under the front of the headset. So they're not clear. There's circuitry between you and the outside world, but the outside world sees your eyes redone on LEDs on the outside. No controller. That could be one of the impressive parts of this, just eye and hand tracking controls. And to keep the weight down, power comes from either plugging it in or connecting it to a two-hour battery pack that'll come with it. Its use cases were all providing gigantic screens. So they showed productivity, doing video conferencing, surfing the web, using Microsoft Office, and entertainment, movies, video games, etc. Apple calls this spatial computing, because you're just turning the world around you into a place for you to set big 2D windows. Spec-wise, it has 12 cameras, 5 sensors, 6 mics, runs on an M2 chip as well as a new chip called the R1 that does a lot of the spatial computing processing, has one physical control, a digital crown, and 23 million pixels Zeiss lenses to do your vision correction. They snap in magnetically, and a wonderful $3,500 price coming next year, early next year. Terence, your best guest. Who is this for? That is a good question. Maybe Apple maybe jumped on the idea of the remote person that wants a more freeing experience while they're working remote to be able to, you know, they mentioned Bluetooth accessories like a magic keyboard, maybe a mouse to where you want to feel more free in your environment but still be fully engaged in your remote work. I'm assuming that's what's for on the onset. Now, later, as maybe third-party developers get on, maybe they'll jump into entertainment like NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB being able to sit courtside, things like that. But right now, I think it's for remote work that people want to get things done but still want to feel kind of free in their environment. Yeah, they did show ESPN doing basketball games where you can like look down on top of the court and stuff because Disney is going to be available on this from day one. I look at that price and I think this is a developer's addition. Nika, does it strike you as that? It actually, it does. I think the biggest thing is, I think Apple was really trying to separate themselves from some of the other AR, VR headsets similar to Oculus because in most of those instances, it's all about entertainment. It's all about fun. And Apple took a completely different approach to this and put it in the way of productivity for the working professional. I think there are some use cases for fun, but they packaged it as a workspace type of environment. So I think they really did it to separate themselves from other AR, VR type products. So that means I won't get to see TikTok videos of people running into walls because they're using Apple. You can run a browser in there. You can run a browser in there. They showed that immersive thing where you can block out the rest of the world, but when people came close to you, those people showed up so you knew they were there. I imagine they could do the same with the wall. I don't know. I don't want to be a naysayer because I was very excited about this. I love VR. I'm pretty enthusiastic about certain things, particularly for fitness. And I just kept waiting. I just kept waiting for Apple to say, and here's the real play, is that now, yeah, you only need a 5x5 little area and your world is... Instead, it was a lot of these sort of beautiful fake, but beautiful apartments that people are living in, but then they're wearing the goggles and you kind of go like, oh, that's very dystopian. Now, you might say dystopian, but cool, and I would agree with that, but there was something about it that just made me feel like, oh, yeah, productivity, that's going to appeal to a lot of folks, but not to the masses. Not to the masses. You're not going to sell a $3,500 piece of gadgetry to most people given that you're like, you can watch an immersive basketball game. Oh, people want more real world things. And I just honestly, I think it was implied because they kept mentioning, working natively with Apple apps that you have on your device. So I think they really were implying that you could use this as an immersive, like interactive, like you're physically in your phone type of experience. That's kind of what I gathered from it. Again, like I said before, I think they wanted to put a clear distinction between what other people are doing and what they're doing. I think that's why they highlighted the productivity aspects of it, but also gave you the idea that you could use this in a variety of scenarios, but I don't think they wanted it visually to the masses that, oh, this is just for fun, this is just for entertainment, but subtly saying, you can use your iPhone apps on this device. So I really think they took more of a PR kind of approach to this announcement rather than a, you know, consumer like type focus. No, I think you're right, Nika. That was one of the things I was wondering is why are you announcing it now? When they announced that it isn't coming out until early next year, and they gave you this really high price this far in advance, which they didn't have to do. But just swing on that. Apple's done it before. Why announce it now? Why announce it at WWDC where they don't traditionally announce hardware? They've done it before, but they don't always. And I think it's because a lot of the Scuttlebutt before this came out was that some people in Apple thought it was too soon to announce it. And I think the bet is let's call it a pro so that we can put out a cheaper one later and let's make this pitch to developers who will spend $3,500. $3,500 is exactly what HoloLens and all these others are when they have their developers edition. Let's make the pitch to developers at WWDC to say, you should start making stuff for this now so that when it comes out and then when we put the cheaper one out later, there'll be lots of apps. And that's what I was thinking with the pro, Vision Pro. Why do I call it the Vision Pro out the gate? Maybe alluding to the fact that there is a vision light or a vision regular to where it's less functionality, maybe strips away some of the functionality things of that nature to where, like you mentioned, Tom, this is going to the developers so they're going to announce the higher one earlier and then let the developer side how this thing works outside of native apps. Because the hardware is impressive. They don't have to talk about Field of View. That pass-through is really good. Again, a lot of proofs in the pudding of how well it actually works, but Apple has a good track record of making this stuff work. If they've got that lag in latency down to where this is as good as your vision. So there's no nausea. There's none of that weirdness that you get with VR. If they have cracked all that, then the big problems are price and utilization. And those are the weaknesses I saw. I don't know. Battery life also. That too. That too. Two hours on a battery pack has to be on your headset or on your person otherwise. It reminds me of space. When they do the space walks they have the hoses connected. I was wondering if they were ever going to address it because in all of the images they had it connected, I'm just like this is so visually unattractive and Apple is known for visually stunning devices and I'm like this little hook in the back and the thing slid in your pocket. I'm just like no. Supple woven cable. Supple and woven. Yes. Lovely as it is. This does again, going back to your point Tom, if you're a developer you're probably not trying to swing a golf club. That's not what you're doing with this device. So the whole idea of being wired or being wireless for a pretty short amount of time is not the end of the world. For consumers who want to have fun, Nika, like you said, the metafolks have been touting the fun aspect of VR for a while and I'm in the agreement that it can be really fun. If you find the app that works for you you do not want to be wired and you want more than two hours battery life. Neither of those things are good scenarios and that if I were a fly on the wall I would assume that Apple was like you know what? We said we're going to announce this thing, let's just announce it and we're just going to kind of gloss over the fact that it's actually not extremely a mobile immersive experience even though that's what we're touting it as. I honestly thought it was going to be a one more thing but I thought one more thing in October. I didn't think one more thing in June. It just didn't make sense to me. Let's leave this on a positive. My positives are that the eye tracking where you just look at something to be able to select it and then you just pinch to click, no need for controllers. I believe Apple will make that work really well because they're good at that sort of thing. That is impressive. Terrence, you got a positive? Definitely like the optic verification. I forget the actual. Optic ID. I made a joke that Apple has now to have this thumbprint, now they have your eyes and now that it will have your face, now they have your eyes so all your biometrics are belong to us now. But all the device and it's all on device and it's secure exactly. That's the point I was getting at. It's secure even though they're adding all the biometrics. Nika, your last positive? I have to co-sign with you, Tom. I think the eye tracking and the finger click it was just so slick and I was like, it was when the woman who was doing on the couch it was like a very slight movement and the fact that you can look at the web browser and the fact that it will you can just look at it and then the other thing was having the physical world come to this spatial world where you can use your physical trackpad or your keyboard and type directly into this, you know, vision world I just thought it was so slick the way that they have this running so I'm intrigued by it. I have to say not only as a developer but also as a fan of Apple. It's just the eye tracking, the finger click and the visual, the virtual the physical world to the vision world in our action. It was just really seamless and slick. I mean, when you compare it to a $6,000 monitor suddenly it actually starts to make more sense it kind of depends on how you look at it. Sarah, your last positive? Last positive is probably the fact that although I was hoping this was going to be a little sleeker than the VR headsets that we're used to, it is slimmer and I think the more we go in that direction the more this is going to be something that people say I could put this on my face like sunglasses it's sort of that Google Glass conversation that we had many years ago but it is it's nice looking. The hardware is really nice looking. Before we get to the operating systems which is usually what we expect at WWDC Apple announced some other new hardware a 15 inch MacBook Air starting at $1,299 a price drop for the 15 inch MacBook Air down $100 to $1099 New Mac Studios coming with the M2 Mac's chip as well as a brand new chip the M2 Ultra the studio starts at $1,999 that's what the Mac's not the new Ultra and that M2 Ultra is also powering a new Mac Pro and that finishes the transition off Intel everything is available with Apple Silicon now and the new Mac Pro starts at $6,999 with the cheese greater look. Do these appeal to you? I'm going to have to say no I think I'm all set with my curing M2 Terrence, what about you? I might be attracted to one of the older maybe like an M1 Air for the misses she's got an Intel 2019 MacBook Air and I think she's her stuff on her computer says she's ready for an upgrade I say delete all that stuff and you can last a couple more years you know I'm not the CFO of the family so I don't know, six Gen 4 PCI expansion slots on an Apple Mac Pro did that turn your head Sarah? It did I've never, I turned my head for sure Eight Thunderbolt ports? Which I don't need personally I mean I'd love to need them figure out a way to use something like that but just kind of just having that robust machine that you know the Mac Pro folks used to love and I know many Mac Pro folks felt like they were left in the lurch for the last decade really you know besides some small incremental things I also like the cheese gritter look bring it back yeah let's do this 24 4k camera feeds in real time encoded in real time this is a beast I know it's $7,000 that's why I'm like I can't use that I don't know how to be creative enough to use that but I love the fact that that is what is being offered to folks less than the price of two vision that's what the pro line should be alright folks if you have a thought about this or any of the hardware be sure to send us an email we love to hear about it feedback at dailytechnewshow.com the more traditional part of WWDC is the operating assistant announcements and we got those two iOS 17 has contact posters bigger pictures of folks in your contact list live voicemails kind of fun this is something Google folks have had for a long time Android folks have had this lets you see a transcription and pick up the phone before the message is done if you want just like we did in the 80s with physical phones you can leave a message on FaceTime now if you're calling somebody on FaceTime auto correct has a bunch of improvements supposed to get smarter drop now lets you bump to transfer contacts you can make stickers out of your live photos something called standby mode really let you use your phone you turn it on its side and put it on a little stand and it can act like a smart screen any of these iOS 17 features catch anybody's attention Terrence you were saying this felt like a smaller update well as far as the list of things they announced yeah other years definitely smaller but definitely fine tune in Iowa 17 specifically I've done how to's on how the best way to transfer contacts and you know you got to jump through the way of airdrop and you got to make sure your airdrop make sure it's for everyone and then you got to go through all these hoops just to be able to do the airdrop of the contacts so the fact that now in Iowa 17 it just lets you bump transfer automatically that takes a couple of steps will make it actually easier to share contacts so that was the one that jumped out to me the most yeah I like the call screening thing because that's great on Android speaking of calling the idea that you can someone's in the process of leaving you a message and you can say no no no I'm here I'm here doesn't that just harken back to the you know we all have answering machines you know I just got home I just got home I'm here I'm here hi hi Jenzy gets the wonders of calls to me I don't know what our fragile egos maybe some folks might be a little but hurt that are you screening me right you would have picked up the call exactly yeah I mean that's I don't know I guess it's another it's a small but more seamless way to say well yeah there might be a reason that like I don't know I was in the shower and now you're leaving me a message but I really want to talk to you so you know instead of like listening to the end of the voicemail calling you back it's little things like that I always appreciate well we also got the new journal app the ability to take personalized suggestions based on what the phone knows about you again not in the cloud this all on your device and like hey would you would you like to write about your day or looks like you had interesting travels so people are into journaling like that I'm not but but I know a lot of folks are including my sister so she might be willing to to pick this up Nika anything I was 17 stand out to you um the stickers seem fun the live stickers the live stickers yeah that seems like a lot of fun but I have to say following up on the journaling app I would like to journal more but I'm more of a paperless type of person so I have physical journals just stacks of them that are empty I just bought them because they were pretty and I was like yeah I'm gonna really journal this year and you know you never get around to it but my phone you know I I digitally type in just about everything to do list because I can strike them through I can highlight them I can do all these things so the journaling app for the paperless kind of person um I mean I think that might I don't know I'm gonna try it out and see if it sticks oh nice yeah let us know how it goes maybe we'll even do a live with it with the journal when it comes out yeah I I'm like you Nika I mean I don't I could not well I'm in a new location now but but even you know the last like five years of my life I'd be like hard press to find a pen right I don't know I just type everything you know I really you know I have to write anything out yeah so well some people are like we love pens um but I but I'm I'm like you I you know I prefer I don't know I guess less office clutter but um the journaling aspect of things is really helpful for people I know people who do that not even know because they're trying to like work through something bad in their life it's just kind of a great way to start the day type thing so I think that if Apple can make this part of the you know it's our ecosystem but it's for your own you know personal health then I think you know that that ties into a lot of you know what they're trying to do with the fitness app not a lot to talk about with the iPad OS 17 lock screen widgets which a lot of people have wanted for a long time so that's a big one and better pdf handling which I'm always skeptical on the promises of this so I want to see it in person but it actually looks pretty cool at the ability to identify fields and do auto fill on the iPad works on scanned docs too you can have safe signatures and all of that macOS Sonoma is the name of the next macOS because that's where Sarah is so they wanted to make sure they named the next macOS after where she is well I'm in Sonoma County Tom Sonoma County they didn't distinguish whether it was the town or the county it's just it's Sonoma I am from Sonoma County, California so that was very exciting I got a big whoop over at my house for that there's game mode to prioritize games and in fact they even brought on Kojima death stranding directors cut coming to Mac they're always trying to push the gaming aspect of Macs Apple TV style screensavers let off the announcement which made me feel like maybe they didn't have a lot to announce but I felt like there was some better stuff overlay options for video conferencing mm-hmm is going to be very upset about this because it's doing exactly what that third party app does and it works with any video conference so you can have yourself show up over a presentation screen or in a little bubble you can make any site into a web app and add it to the doc the site itself doesn't have to do anything in advance lots of good private browsing features if you're using Safari to keep things private Terrence anything else in here or any of that that you really liked I really wish they would have brought the what they call them the live interactive widgets to the iOS 17 so I got away a little bit longer to get them on my phone versus getting them on my iPad one of the things let you take widgets from iPhone and iPad and put them on macOS they just didn't do the interactive part yeah yeah and I want the interactive part on my actual phone version so that and then I noticed that QR codes still live back in the early 2010s maybe 2008-2009 I was big in the QR codes and people were like those are stupid but now with the TVOS the actual like if you're going to a hotel oh you're jumping ahead yeah but that was cool I like that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so I see QR codes still live and the other one was the continuity for TVOS so that was the ones that I was attracted to the most I know that's not like you said that's not until TVO at the Apple part but I was looking forward to those those jumped out to me at the the most yeah though there was a there was some good stuff with AirPods getting adaptive audio so blending noise canceling and transparency you don't have to choose it can sort of know whether you're talking to somebody here that you start talking and adapt car play gets the ability for any iPhone in the car to share and control music and like Terrence just mentioned zoom and Starbucks coming to Apple TV using continuity so that your iPhone or your iPad can be the camera watch OS getting smart stacks on the home screen so when you turn the crown you can you can see various cards also new cycling and hiking features for watch the addition of emotion logging to the health app that'll be on iPhone too but you can do it from the watch and some interesting vision features that uses the watch to tell how close you are to a screen how often you are outside which the amount of time it actually helps reduce myopia so lots of interesting things both on the on the watch OS TV OS and in Mac OS side last thoughts Nika about any of these other OS announcements today honestly I think a lot of the OS announcements were after thoughts to the big kahuna which we've talked about already there was some slick thing that's like Terrence mentioned with the airplane for hotels I thought that was really cool so I was like okay I I'm into that and and also you know using your Apple TV as you know a video conferencing type of thing where you can toggle between your phone and have your face time you know through your actual TV on Apple TV so I thought that was kind of cool as well there was some some you know neat things kind of buried in there but you know overall I you know I don't see a whole lot and maybe that's just because we're used to some really show stopper things in a new OS but you know I think we're getting to the point where there's just not that much you can do with the operating system they were struggling on getting some stuff for watch OS to me you know it always seems like well not just Apple announcements but any announcement you know where a company is like alright we're going to talk for a couple of hours and let's start with audio you go okay they're trying to get it out of the way but but you know but some of the carplay stuff appeals to me I mean carplay is something I use in my car every day and that being easier for you know if I have a passenger for us to you know be able to kind of plug and play our various stuff that's on our iOS devices and make that easier that's cool I'm into that everything else felt like yeah Apple wants you to think of it as the company that cares about your health other companies do the same but Apple really leaning into that especially with watch OS stuff so that's cool and otherwise yeah I felt like it was it was filler before we were talking about a VR device I will say I see Apple learned from Google and Harley mentioned AI at all they mentioned machine learning but they hardly didn't say AI at all even though we know there's some AI baked in there but Apple learned their lesson it's like yeah now we're not going to be parodied parodied you know say it AI 50 billion times like I think it was Samsung or Google I can't remember which one I appreciated that they made the effort to tell me what kind is it a language model is it a machine learning model is it something else and don't just throw AI out there because it's an empty buzzword I actually like that quite a bit and most people think of AI these days as the generative text they don't realize the scope and the expansiveness of what AI does and I think if they were to mention it they would get put in that small bubble of the small box of what the mainstream think AI is indeed indeed well that is going to wrap it up for us on WWDC right I guess I mean I think it was such a it was there was a lot that went into that that show and I think you know sometimes we can think on it a little bit but we could not think Nika Monford and Terence Gaines more for being with us we are the Apple announcement crew at this point the SNAP OS team knows what they're talking about they love this stuff as much as we do if not more so let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work Nika we'll start with you you can find me at tech savvy diva on all of the social media platforms and you can also find me on Terence and I's show SNAP OS by going over to SNAPOScast.com and you can find me on the internets at brother tech that's b-r-o-t-h-a-t-e-c-h like Nika mentioned we also do a Apple specific podcast at SNAPOScast.com you can also find me at brothertech.com and we also do with Rob Dunwood and tech like Steph who have been on the show before we do a technology podcast from quote-unquote different to IE black perspective with the tech John T.E.C.H. J.A.W.N. definitely check us out there on both of these shows we'll be talking a little bit more about Apple's W.W.D.C. announcement this week well we're so so pleased to have you with us today thank you again no problem no problem at all hey patrons stick around if you like the conversation we're having we're going to talk a little more about you know the announcement itself how it went down why they're making it now that sort of thing on good day internet stick around for that you can also catch DTNS live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern that's 200 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com we are back again tomorrow with Alice and Sheridan joining us and I bet she has W.W.D.C. thoughts as well don't miss it this show is part of the Frog Pants Network get more at frogpants.com Ironman Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover