 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you, including Howard Yermish, John Atwood, Pat and our new patrons, Jerry File, Mohammed, Scott, Karsten, Gerald, Brian, David, Notleet, Luke, Justin and Isaac. On this episode of DTNS, Mickey Mouse heads into the public domain, China's selling more EVs, but the U.S. is not. Nika Montford helps us understand why, plus why Apple didn't release a new iPad this year. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom there. And dancing at Studio 54, I'm Sarah Lane. From the Atlanta area, I'm Nika Montford. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Now all last year, we started the show by saying it was our 10th year, and now that's done. We're 10 years old. Yay! We're in fourth grade. We're a 10-ager. Yeah. A tween. A tween. DTNS is officially a tween. Yay! Thank you to everybody who has supported us throughout the whole year. I'm sorry we don't have a bigger celebration deal or whatever going on, but we seriously appreciate you and we're going to do what we do best, starting with the quick hits. Telegram released version 10.5.0 with a redesigned look for voice and video calls, including new animations and backgrounds that update based on call status. Telegram also says it should use less power and save your battery life as a result. And for Android fans, the power-efficient Thanos Snap visual effect is coming in that turns deleted messages to dust. Finally, bots can now react to messages and work with quoted messages and also send replies. Because it doesn't work like that. LG has a bit of a tradition of announcing lots of stuff in December ahead of showing it off and giving a few more details at CES in January. So here's a rundown of some of the things that announced over the last week or so. The Dukebox rhymes with a jukebox. It's a smart speaker with vacuum tubes. And you can see the tubes through an adjustable transparent OLED display. There's also the MyView series of 32-inch 4K monitors. Those run WebOS, so not only can they be a smart TV, they can also run Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Those will run between $500 and $600. The Cinebeam Cube, spelled with a Q, Q-U-B-E, is a 4K projector with a handle. Makes it look like a coffee grinder. New LGGram laptops will include Intel's Ultra Chips for on-device AI processing. And finally, an unnamed two-legged wheeled robot similar to Amazon's Astro that LG says can act as a home monitor. Apps like eBay and Airbnb that allow private citizens to earn money within the app will now be reporting those earnings to tax authorities based on a new agreement from the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. The OECD includes Europe, the US, the UK, Israel, Japan, Korea, and more. The amount of tax you might need to pay on this income will vary by country. Counterpoint released its estimates on premium smartphone sales in 2023. It defines premium, if you're like, what does that mean, as a wholesale value of $600 or more. That equates to a retail price of 800 bucks or more. The projected premium total smartphone market rose globally, bucking the trend of 6 points to 24 percent record sales of premium phones in 2023. Such of the growth in 2023 was driven by China, Western Europe, India, and Middle East and Africa regions, with India being the fastest growing premium market globally. Apple dropped four points in the premium market, but still is dominant with 71 percent market share, followed by Samsung with 17 percent and Huawei resurgent with 5 percent. Cameramakers, news organizations, and technology companies are looking to differentiate their images from those generated by that pesky artificial intelligence, creating a free web tool called Verify, which checks for authenticity of images and is being adopted by Nikon, Canon, and Sony. So if an image has a verified digital signature, the tool will display the date, the location, and other credentials for that image. Camera manufacturers are updating firmware on professional cameras to support Verify this year, and Canon has a new camera in development coming next year that will also support Verify directly. All right, let's get to the big news then. All right, everybody, Mickey Mouse now in the public domain in the U.S. You likely saw or even heard of some headlines about this, and some people are a little confused. What does this mean? Since copyright is a big part of all of our modern rights online, let's go over what this does and doesn't mean, Tom. Okay, Sarah, first a bit of history. U.S. copyright law used to be 28 years. You get something protected for 28 years until 1976 when they started extending it, and it got extended twice to end up being 95 years, or the life of the author plus 70 years, whichever one is shorter. It's more complicated for sound recordings, so you may see that some recordings that are 100 years old are going into the public domain. But for non-sound recordings, that includes film, they go in after 95 years. Okay, so back to Steamboat Willie. The Mickey Mouse in the film is now public domain. That means there is no copyright protection for it. Anybody can use it. It does not mean Mickey Mouse itself is public domain. It gets a little complicated, and a lot of it would be up to how a judge would decide it if it went to court. But essentially, you can do anything you want with the film, Steamboat Willie. You can recut it, remix it, et cetera, et cetera, and you can derive things from it as long as what you derive is not from other copyrighted works. You also have to keep in mind that Mickey Mouse is a trademark, not just a copyright. So you can copy Steamboat Willie, but you can't make him your logo and say, this is my company logo. That's trademarked to Disney. So you can't go using the name in any way that would make people think what you made is from Disney. But, Niki, you were saying it took you a minute to wrap your mind around the fact that Steamboat Willie is just public. Nobody can get the copyright on it anymore. Yeah, so when this first came out in the news and everyone was talking about it, I initially thought, oh my gosh, anybody can use or buy the rights to Mickey Mouse. And I'm like, how did Disney let that happen? But I now realize it's because of US copyright law. And it does make it a little bit, if you don't know the nuance, if you haven't read a little bit further, you would think like I did off the top that, oh, this means that it's free game for anybody to use or to own. And so it really is kind of complicated once you look into the details around it. But I was absolutely initially concerned that, oh, wow, anybody can do anything with the imagery of Mickey Mouse and Disney not be able to do anything about it. I mean, OK, this is maybe a stupid question, but I bet a lot of other people have it. OK, Mickey Mouse is in the film Steamboat Willie. Mickey Mouse exists in many, many other places outside of that film. Can you only remix the film? Yeah. So OK, so then how are we seeing? Because a couple of the headlines that I was seeing are examples like, for example, the slasher film called Mickey's Mouse Trap, the video game called Infestation 88, that have Mickey-esque stuff inside. Can you not say the words Mickey Mouse? No, no, they could they could say the words Mickey Mouse, but they have to be careful of infringing on trademark if they do, right? So that's a whole separate conversation. They can show a Mickey Mouse in their slasher film that looks like the Steamboat Willie one, but if Disney could go to court and say, that's not the Steamboat Willie one, that's the one from Fantasia somehow and convince a judge of that, then they would be infringing. So that's why I said a lot of it depends on what a judge would decide, but they are fairly well protected as long as they stick pretty close to what Steamboat Willie has. There's also apparently an advertisement for Steamboat Willie that had the yellow hands and the red shorts in it. And so some people are like, well, you can now use that one too, because that was published the same year as Steamboat Willie. So it does get tricky, but yeah, it does mean that you can see people use the image of Mickey Mouse a lot more now. But it's just like you said, the Steamboat Willie version. So Mickey Mouse has, his look has evolved over the years. So you can't use any evolution of Mickey Mouse, it has to be localized to that specific version of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. I could make a Steamboat Willie video game just as long as I stick to, you know, what it looked like in Steamboat Willie, a bunch of other stuff. Winnie the Pooh's first work went into public domain, believe it was last year. We saw the Winnie the Pooh horror film at that point. House at Pooh Corner is now in the public domain. So that brings Tigger into the public domain. You've also got The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie, All Quiet on the Western Front, which everybody made movies of before it went into the public domain. It's now in the public domain. Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The song, Mack the Knife in German. Interesting. It's now in the public domain. Now, you said. But not the recording of the song. Just the, you know, just the work itself. Now, you've mentioned All Quiet on the Western Front before it entered the public domain. How can a film get away with that? Well, they paid. They paid for the license, right? Got it. Got it. So there's a license in there. You get permission. Well, and I guess they might have not paid, but I'm guessing they paid. Yeah. But you get, if you get permission, then you can do it. Yeah. It doesn't mean it's completely hands off it. Just means you don't just get to kind of do what you want unless you want to lawsuit. Exactly. Public domain means I don't need to ask anybody's permission. It is no longer protected by copyright. So I can, I can go and use that work as much as I want. Interesting stuff. Well, Apple did something pretty crazy last year, something it hasn't done since 2010. Anybody have guesses? All right, I'll just tell you it failed to release a new version or even a refresh of a single iPad model. Yeah. Instead of that signaling that Apple is no longer committed to the iPad, rumors and analysts forecast point to 2024 may be being a pretty significant year for the iPad lineup with every model, including the entry level iPad iPad mini iPad air and iPad pro, possibly getting a hardware refresh. Apple has not said that they're doing this, but those, that's kind of the rumor mill. Now, if a rumored 12.9 inch iPad air also launches this year, also a rumor, that would be a record six new iPad models in 2024 and expand the lineup overall. Now, Nika, obviously we're waiting on the vision pro. That continues to loom on the horizon. Other rumors point to as early as later this month for a launch there, knowing that that's going to be kind of the thing of the year for Apple, you know, the new and cool thing. How do you feel about it potentially also being a big iPad year? What I actually think is like you mentioned, vision pro is to me the cornerstone of Apple's launches for 2024. And really anything that comes in addition to that barring, you know, at the new iPhone later this year, it would really kind of step on, you know, the what the vision pro stands for and, you know, Apple's crowning jewel. So I think it's likely if we do get new iPads, which we probably will since we didn't get anything last year, to me, I think it's going to go along the lines of a highly produced video announcing the launch of whatever new iPads they come out with and post it to the website, something of, hey, go check out an email, go out, hey, we got new iPads, go check out the video, learn how to buy, find out about it, barring some significant, you know, redesign or overhaul of the iPad, which I don't think they actually have the time for since a lot of focus has been on vision pro. I really think that's likely, you know, what we're going to see happen with iPads. I think it's going to be sad to say a bit of a footnote in the big year of vision pro. I also wonder how many of the iPad product lineup remains. I mean, we've got first iPad that launched in 2010, iPad mini launched in 2012, first gen of all these iPad air launched in 2013, iPad pro in 2015, no new iPad mini since the sixth gen that was back in 2021. If I had to guess, I would say the iPad mini goes away. It's never made much sense to me as a product. Now, you might be home saying, I love my iPad mini. I'm a big iPhone person. So when you got the Max Pro next to the iPad mini, they're too close to me for me. So it's never made a lot of sense to me. And yeah, the rumors have swirled that the iPad mini might not be long for this world anyway. But I also just think Apple might say, we don't need to do iPad refreshes every year. People don't buy iPads with the same frequency that they buy iPhones. No, I think Paul hit on it. I'm going to steal his take from the chat room iPad fold. Because I was thinking, oh, the reason they didn't do an iPad last year was logistical. So maybe they're trying to get everything over to the M ship and they didn't want to steal M ships from the MacBooks. And so they didn't want to switch it yet. If they're planning a fold, not only does that fit my logistical thing, which is, oh, they have a whole bunch of new parts that they need to make sure they have enough of before they launch it. It also fits what you were saying, Sarah, which is, let's get rid of the iPad mini. The new iPad mini is a fold. It's an iPad mini when it's folded. And it's a bigger iPad when you unfold. It's the best iPad mini ever. It's the best iPad mini you've ever had. So yeah, you know, I mean, I think we're right. This was our 2023 production show. That would have been a real good one. And I think there's, that makes a lot of sense, Paul. Thank you. And if Apple sticks to the rumors of releasing the Vision Pro end of January, maybe even into February, maybe the iPad fold gets pushed back. And maybe it's like a late spring type of announcement. So everybody kind of has, every product kind of has its moment to flourish. Because at the very beginning of the year, we get the Vision Pro. Everybody's, oh my God, what is it? Let's play with it. Let's see what it is. Then when the novelty and the excitement of the initial launch wears off, then they hit you again with boom. Now we got an iPad fold. And, you know, we're just so innovative. We got innovation, you know, coming out the yin-yang. So that, you know, Paul might be onto something there. The usual, with last year accepted, the usual pattern was to release iPads in March. So they might go back to that with potentially a foldable. Because I think it was the Minis that usually got released in March too. I know Charlie and Columbus is like iPad Mini's selling point was price. The key there, Charlie, is the past tense. If we do what we're thinking and what Paul is suggesting, it would probably not be a selling point that it was price anymore. And they would maybe just discount the iPad Air and say that that's now the affordable one, something like that. Well, folks, if you've got thoughts on this, like Paul did, we love to hear them. And we like to share them around. Because it helps us all understand what's going on in tech better. One of the great ways to do that is in our Discord. You can join our Discord and get in on the conversation there by linking your Patreon account. So become a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS. It's like 25 cents a show. Super cheap. And then link it to the Discord. You can start chatting with everybody you want. Toward the end of last year, a number of automakers started pairing back on their electric vehicle plans. Sales were starting to drop or slow. Rivian missed its quarterly delivery expectations. Tesla met its delivery estimates in Q4, but they had to cut prices to do it. And Ford has said it's cutting back production of its F-150 lightning for the next year. Meanwhile, China is a different story. BYD saw sales rise 61.9% on the year, passing Tesla to become the leading seller in Q4. And China's Geely also raised its sales forecasts. Nika, you've been following all of this. What's going on here? So this is very interesting, especially with the new knowledge, new to me, about what's going on with China and their sales goals. But if you'll notice, prices of EVs, I think, are exceeding some initial expectations. Everyone, maybe a couple of years ago, EVs are the way of the future. You had the federal government saying they wanted fleets fully electric by 2030. Most, if not all, of your major car players were in on it. It's like, yes, let's get these EVs out. Ford, GM, you mentioned Rivian. Of course, you already know Tesla. They're like, let's get this ball rolling. Let's get these new fleets of vehicles out. Well, now we've come to the point where it's a little bit oversaturation. There are lots of EVs available, more planned EVs to come. And they aren't quite selling so much in the US. And I think it can be attributed to a couple of things. Again, I mentioned cost or reduce in demand. And then, of course, that sneaky little I word inflation. We also have had the UAW strikes last year. So it's a lot of things kind of toiling around that can attribute to this. In addition to issues with infrastructure, as you remember in President Biden's infrastructure plan, there was a section carved out specifically for making sure charging stations were available, making sure batteries are being produced in the US. And I think the plan through the federal government with this infrastructure plan, I don't think it's quite moving as fast as production is from these different companies. And it's just one of those things where everybody is flooding the market with their versions. And again, we can't negate the fact that last year we saw a lot of layoffs as well. So I think when you couple in cost of productions, when you factor in what people losing their jobs, holding onto their cars a little bit longer. And I also think there's another thing that we may not really maybe notice so much. It's the fact that anytime there's a major shift in, especially in the US, of adopting new technology or new products, a lot of Americans meet some of these things with skeptibility. I don't know if I really trust cars with batteries. Give me my combustible engines. I know the oil works, the gas works. Let's keep up with that. So not everybody is really early adopters. So I think that has a point to it as well. And we've seen, what is it for? They've reduced their production for their electric F-150. GM once had a plan to have, to produce 400,000 electric vehicles by mid 2024. That's this year. So that's basically a few months down. They recently backed off of that that production goal back in November, I believe. So it's one of those things where there's a lot at play here. But I think it's just growing pains of bringing in something, trying to overhaul the way that we work and the way that we move in society. I think the pendulum will eventually swing back on the positive side of EVs. But right now, the water's a little bit murky. It seems like a combination of pocket books being tightened and also just market saturation. Looking at this as compared to BYD's sales rising a lot over in China, it's not that someone who doesn't have an EV will never have one in the future. But I think we're still in that period where if you want one and you understand how your life will be fine with one, and in many cases, much better, then you potentially already have your EV. There are a lot of folks who still can't quite figure out why it's worth, in many cases, the extra cost or yet changing your daily patterns enough to make it make sense. I actually, now that I'm back in Los Angeles, I mean, Los Angeles is full of just more cars than pretty much anywhere else. But in the Bay Area, there were so many more Tesla's and just EVs in general that I just saw on a daily basis. And I think it does point to a lot of people spending a lot more time in their cars and the charging situation, depending on where you live, just not making a lot of sense yet. Yeah. And to all your points, BYD sells its cars in a lower price range. They're not cheap. They're still high $20,000, $30,000 equivalent, but it's cheaper than Tesla on average. So even BYD didn't sell what they thought they would sell, but they still made a lot of cars and they still sold a lot of cars. I think another thing that's happening is competition. So we're all talking about a confluence of events, right? There's that skepticism that Nico's talking about that kicks in at a certain point where companies get a little more excited about their new thing than the customer base is, and there's a little lag between it. I think we're right. I think we're seeing that. And there's just inflation, economic uncertainty. I don't know if I want to splash out on something that's a little more expensive, I'll go with a more affordable model. That's definitely happening. But there's also more choice. So Ford isn't the only company making electric vehicles, right? Even though it may be only one of a few making a truck, it's starting to see that some people are like, you know what? Maybe I'll choose a Chevy Bolt. Maybe I'll choose a Jeep Wrangler plug-in hybrid instead, which means they might have to readjust and say, you know what? We're not going to make as many because there's more competition than we expected out there. Competition is good for the consumer. It is. It should bring down the prices though. And we're not seeing that. I think partly because the subsidies in the US have changed. So starting now, starting as of January 1st, your EV tax credit applies to fewer models of EVs than it did last year because of the restrictions on where the parts have to come from. Batteries can't be made in China, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of details on those parts and what the restrictions are. But the upshot at the end is it's a shorter list of vehicles that get the full $7,500 credit. It's Chevy Bolt, Chrysler Pacifica, Ford F-150, the Tesla models. That's it. You want a Rivian. You want a Jeep Grand Cherokee. You want a Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring. You're getting a $3750 tax credit. You're getting a lower tax credit. That means the prices effectively are going to look higher to consumers. Yeah. And it's one of those things where electric vehicles aren't such a novice anymore. They've become quote unquote mainstream. So they are more accessible than they initially were when the original rebates were happening, incentives were happening. So it makes sense that now that it's becoming a part of our, that EVs are becoming a part of our everyday life, that the adjustments and the rebates for them, the incentives for them are going down because the goal, as with what the government and President Biden have wanted is to have the fleet by 2030. So EVs will become, in theory, more less of an anomaly, less than just combustible engines. So it makes sense that the incentives are fluctuating and reflecting that change. And I think you're right. This is probably not like, oh, EVs were a fraud. This is probably, hey, the curves are never linear. And sometimes they look like they're going down temporarily. And that's probably what we're seeing. We're just seeing a slowdown in it. I think you're probably right. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Damon wrote in and said, with the announcement of Bird, eScooter company filing for bankruptcy back in December, and talk on the show about how much longer the eScooter market can stay afloat, one place that may never die is on college campuses. Damon says, I work at a large university. During the boom, the campus was flooded the scooters from Lyme, Bird, and others. Many of the problems that were discussed on the show, scooters ended up in fountains, rivers, backyards. Recently, the university partnered with one company, Vio, and it's been much better. Students didn't want a total ban on the scooters because they're a great way to get across campus quickly. And the university wanted one company to be responsible for the maintenance of the fleet. I feel that college campuses and other locations that are more pedestrian focused are better suited for this mode of transportation than in the downtown of a large city where automobile traffic is higher. Yeah, I don't think these scooters are going away. I think we're just figuring out where they work. Where they work best. There were some places that maybe they didn't work, so yeah. I mean, they are in all sorts of front yards around my new neighborhood, and I don't know how that's working. I just don't understand. Yeah, I don't see them in my neighborhood, but I see them near my neighborhood. So I feel like, oh, they aren't working here, but they're working a couple blocks away, if that makes any sense. I also see people riding them, so it's not just that they're discarded and left to die, but yeah, they're working somehow still. And we got an email from Lance in Mississippi who said, I loved the discussion on smart car functionality with AI. I just wanted to let Sarah know that my wife has the same vehicle that she does, the Volvo XC60, I believe, and actually will do those functions of I'm cold or I'm hot and adjust the temperature incrementally. You just have to say it, just in case you didn't know. Thanks for the awesome show, as always. Have you tried it? No, no, Lance, I'm gonna try it now. By the time I read this email, I was, I don't know, I didn't have a good reason to get in my car. I had to work on the show this morning, but let me tell you this afternoon, I'm gonna give it a shot. Fantastic. Thank you, Lance. Yeah. And thanks to you, Nika Modford. Happy New Year to you. Let folks know where they can keep up with you in 2024. Sure. As always, it's great to be here with you guys. You can find me at TechSavvyDiva pretty much everywhere. Also, you can head on over to snuboescast.com and get all the details on the Apple-themed podcast that I co-host with Brother Tech, Terence Gaines. Fantastic. Now, patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. I'd say we let our hair down, but that wouldn't apply to me. But we do kind of relax and kick back and talk a little more. Nika's gonna update us on what's happening with Microsoft Co-Pilot. That's the AI assistant for developers. Stick around for that. Reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We're back again tomorrow talking about Square Enix's aggressive plan to use AI in its games with none other than Scott Johnson.