 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show made possible by its listeners, thanks to every single one of you, including Audrey Stoll Adler's spot, Dale Mulcahy, Matt Zaglin, Ariadne, who's shout out is sponsored by Kevin from Milwaukee and new patron Tossos. Welcome in Tossos, everybody. On this episode of DTNS, have chips hit rock bottom, the robot vacuum you've been waiting for, and the streaming TV consolidation melee is about to begin. That's Disney's fault. Actually, it's concussed. On this episode of DTNS, have chips hit rock bottom? Yes, that's right. I already read that line. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 2nd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lee. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And it's not his fault that I did that, by the way. It's probably the Halloween candy. It's no one's fault. OK. Nobody's fault. All the all the joy. Nothing's ever anybody. It was Ghirardelli Minis this year. Oh, nice. Yeah. All right, let's start with quick hits. Back in July of this year, the Norwegian data protection authority imposed a temporary ban on Facebook and Instagram conducting targeted behavioral advertising. Now the European Data Protection Board has instructed the Irish Data Protection Commission to extend that ban to all of Europe in the next two weeks. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is under Irish jurisdiction in Europe. The company has also been fighting these decisions in court. The first independent benchmarks of Apple's new M3 Max chips have started showing up on the Geekbench 6 database. The highest Geekbench multi score multi core score for what we're pretty sure is a 16 inch MacBook Pro with the 16 core CPU is 21,084. That number is real close to 21,316, which is the average score for the M2 Ultra, which is in the Mac Studio. Now that's Max and Ultra. When you compare Max to Max, the M3 Max looks to be testing at around 45 percent faster than the M2 Max, which is pretty close to what Apple said. If you want more on this, check out Roger Chang's column in our Patreon, Patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of Apple, the company discontinued the $5 per month Apple Music Voice Plan to let users access the entire Apple Music catalog exclusively through Siri. Code references in iOS 17.1 Beta suggested that the Apple Music Voice Plan was being discontinued. And now the website has been taken down and redirects to the main Apple Music page. The adoption of Passkey continues for those who aren't familiar. They're like, wait, what's that again? Passkey is the token that uses your devices and your biometrics to authenticate you instead of you having one, two, three, four, five, six as your password and a text message that can be intercepted. How'd you know? Got you again, Justin, Robert Young. Well, if you want to avoid that embarrassment, get a Passkey password manager. Bitwarden is the latest to get on board with Passkey support. It is included in the twenty twenty three point one zero release rolling out now to Bitwarden browser extensions. It is not, however, supported in Bitwarden's mobile app yet. Mint wants the darling of personal finance now closing down. Now, if you're not familiar with what Mint has been doing in Intuit Enquired Mint back in 2009 and is now directing Mint users to switch to Credit Karma, which Intuit has also owned since twenty twenty. Credit Karma lacks Mint's budget tracking tools, though, but instead a simplified way for you to build awareness of your spending and track your savings. Although Intuit says it plans to add ways to track spending and aggregate financial accounts going forward. Mint users have until January 1st, after which it will no longer operate. That stinks. That's mint. Not. It does stink. I actually really liked Mint. I like it currently. Well, not for long. I guess I should enjoy it. I also like Mint currently, but for a very, very small period of time. You better enjoy your last Christmas with Mint, Justin. I know, I know. All right, let's talk about chip makers. They're they look smile. Why are they smiling, Sarah? All right, OK, so one theme coming out of earnings calls from chip makers this week and there were many is that optimism that we've reached the bottom of the PC market and fortunes are about to turn around. Everybody wants to hear that. TSMC, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, AMD all indicated the worst is over for chips. It's only up from here. The optimists believe that advancements in AI will boast will boost growth at the companies. Qualcomm even said in its latest earnings, exactly this. OK, so let's go. Let's go into who said what Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said. The arrival of the AI PC represents an inflection point to the in the PC industry. AMD boss, Lisa Sue said, expected some growth going into 2024, as we think some sort of the AI PC cycle and some of the Microsoft Windows refresh goals. Qualcomm, CFO, Akash, Palak, Palak Iwala said, we're seeing early signs of stabilization in demand for global 3G, 4G, 5G handsets. AMD had the strongest growth in two years until declined. But the decline was almost flat after four quarters where it and AMD also had larger drops. Everybody expects this to be a good holiday season. However, so Candela says that will be something that is going to continue to speed up and expect AI capable PCs to make up 60 percent of shipments by 20 27. OK, so that's not right around the corner, but that's something that, you know, is is the long con, right? So let's pour out some cold water on all this time. Where are we now? Yes, let me rain on your parade, shipmakers. A lot of the analysts look at this and feel like it's overly optimistic. They wonder, where is the killer app for AI that will give that will drive all this new PC adoption? Microsoft Office is the one killer app for AI as it rolls out to enterprise and maybe eventually comes to consumers in the coming year. But is that enough? Then there's the world. China, US trade restrictions are complicating the markets, reducing demand in some cases because you can't sell your chips to the people you used to and just generally making things harder for chipmakers. Interest rates are still high and strong consumer demand is still uncertain. There's there's a lot of reasons for optimism. There's also a lot of reasons for pessimism in the economy. And then, you know, there's there's actual wars being thought in multiple spots on the planet, not just Ukraine and Israel. But those two big ones certainly make it more volatile that something else could happen or spread and nobody knows what's really going to happen there. Justin, given this uncertain world in which we live, are the chip PC makers optimism warranted? I think they better hope that that it is because they have a glut of them and they really want to sell them, where I think that there is reasonable optimism is if we are going to understand that there's a utility to what we are throwing into the broad bucket of AI, right? That with these advancements, you're going to want to do more faster on your PC and whether or not those are these products are developed specifically for that or you have peripheral devices that are developed specifically for that. You are probably going to want something new, so everything goes faster. That is one thing that is universal about any kind of machine learning product, at least the class of which we are understanding now is that they are resource intensive. So in that case, yes, I can see a broad trend that we will look back that we could look back five years from now to this moment and say, yeah, it was very clear that this was going to be the case. And I agree with your perspective. We don't have it now. And I tend to be a little, look a little a scant at anything that is pretending to be the next big thing when we can at least see the outline of it. Yeah, especially because so much of AI is cloud driven. Now, a lot of people wanted to be on device. And so maybe that's enough. But that's not something that's there right now. And yes, there are uncertainty in the economy, uncertainty in the political climate and military climate. But even if you bracket that off and say, well, we can't control that. Just just looking at demand and hoping that all the other conditions hold. I don't know if if it's enough to bring a big boom. I think what they're right in seeing is that there is a turnaround. Like the the the the drop has stopped. How optimistic they should be about growth is the part where I get skeptical. Yeah, the larger problem is the idea of a recession or or some kind of big and then there's anything because that's that's a whole thing that is totally outside of the tech cycle and just totally throws everything off exactly. Oh, yeah. Well, for anybody who loves a good vacuum and a robot vacuum at that, robot vacuums have come a long way. Case in point, the Matic, a new robot from two former Google Nest engineers who worked on the Nest Cam IQ cameras and Nest. Hello, Dorbel, Mahool, Nuri, yeah, yeah, Walla and Navid Dalal. Instead of sensors, bumpers and light are tucked. They say they want to have a robot that has five RGB cameras that can help it navigate areas with high pile rugs, cables that need to be avoided, small spaces in general, all stuff where the, you know, current robot vacuums don't always do their best work. It's also operating on device. This is very interesting, not a cloud component. Doesn't need internet to run smoothly. Now, Matic launched using a subscription model early earlier this year. Now is being sold on its own with discounted pre-orders open at Maticrobots.com for one thousand four hundred ninety five dollars. That's three hundred dollars off the regular price because you're getting into it early and delivery set for March of twenty twenty four. So you're not going to get it over the holiday season. But, you know, pretty soon next year, the founders previously worked on the start of Flutter into tackling the problem of creating a truly autonomous home robot cleaner. So this is where we've landed with the Matic. Yeah, there's a lot of cool things to like about this. The reverb Mike was asking, why is it so clunky looking? And the reason it's so clunky looking is it's borrowing a page from Amazon's Astro robot. It has big wheels. It's got heft so that it can get over those large pile rugs that Sarah was talking about, and it's using computer vision. So I think it needs to be a little higher off the ground than a Roomba so that it can actually see because the big advantage, if you didn't catch it, is that this looks around and avoids things. It recognizes objects. It knows, oh, that's a toy. Oh, that's a pile of crumbs. And then it goes towards the pile of crumbs and avoids the toy. So it doesn't just keep running around, bumping into things, going, oh, I guess a chair is here now. It can actually see things and move a little smoother. And it's more autonomous in just every couple of hours. If you want it to, you can change the settings. It'll just roll out and check things and you can talk to it. It has voice commands. So you can say, go clean the bathroom and it will learn like, oh, you always like me to clean the kitchen at around six o'clock. You always like me to clean the bathroom at around 10 p.m., whatever it is. So there's a lot to love about this, except for the price. That's really the only thing that's a stopper because 14.95 is the pre-sale price. It's going to be $1,600 once it's actually available in regular retail. 17, 17. Oh, 17, 16.99, huh? Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen, I love my Roomba. My Roomba is not the smartest tool in the shed. Let's be honest. But I mean, boy, it's better than not having a vacuum cleaner at all. But I really get what Maddick is going for here, saying, yeah, you know, having sensors and bumping around and, you know, trying to map out a living room, say, is fine. But if you actually have cameras, then it doesn't really matter what, you know, what maybe, you know, there's an ottoman in the room that wasn't there before, and it's not going to freak me out because I'm just use using cameras. And part of this is utilizing the kind of capabilities that we were talking about in our first segment in terms of being able to do more on device. Let me say this. If it's $1,700 and $1,795 and it works, people will pay for it. This has been the model of Dyson. You're going to you're going to spend more on it, but you're not going to need another one. It will work. It will successfully clean your house. We just got our first floor of our house redone with new floors. We decided to buy lighter floors because it brightens up the room. And boy, does it, gang. Here's what else it does. Shows you every crumb you drop on this sometimes. So we need a robot vacuum. And if this, when it rolls out, pun intended, and gets the say, if it gets the kind of reviews that it is able to deliver and it doesn't get stuck and it has an efficacy that is worth that price point, then to me, it is going to be something that will possibly live at our house. It's that the big question is whether it delivers on its promise, I think. Yes, but second to price is no. The Verge wrote a great story about this just based on videos. They have not tried it themselves. So it really does need to deliver on the product promise. But I like the way they chose features. They don't have it automatically empty itself. They have it go to your trash can. You teach it where the trash can is and it goes and just waits there because automatic emptying is unnecessarily complicated and makes this thing not work well. They made it a little chunkier and less sleek looking because that means it can roll over everything and not get stuck. They put computer vision in instead of using LiDAR because computer vision, while harder to pull off, has gotten good enough that it's more effective. So I think this group really knows like these are the tradeoffs to make. I feel like, you know, the fact that it can sense a spot on Justin's brand new floor and say, oh, that's cranberry juice. Let me roll over that multiple times with the mop to make sure I get it, which is what they say it can do. That's huge, right? I'm a glutton with the CJ. Yeah, I know, you're just messy. But it's all over the place. What are you going to do? Why? Why must you constantly spill cranberry juice? It won't matter in the future when you get the mattock made it, whatever it is. Yeah, I will say never has a wire cutter review been more important than whatever the review is on this device. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Well, as you can see, there's all kinds of uses for all kinds of algorithms and models and things you might call AI. And if you want to keep up just on those things, you must get AI named this show in your life. Each week, Tristan Jutra and Teja Kastodi wade through the hype and the doom saying and keep you informed about what's actually happening in the world of AI. You can catch it at AI named this show dot com. I have talked a lot about a lot of things, but especially on cord killers and DTS about how important it'll be when Comcast sells off its remaining stake in Hulu to Disney. Yes, Disney controls Hulu, but Comcast still owned 30 percent. My premise has been that once that happens, the purse strings will open and we'll start to see everybody else jumping in the pool because they're waiting to see what Comcast does with its money. Comcast waiting to get that money. Disney is waiting to pay that money so they see how much they have left. And then everybody's going to start shuffling around pieces on the board on November 1st. Comcast pulled the trigger on this exercise exercising literally its option to sell its stake in Hulu. So this isn't going to finish until January. That's why if you've heard me before, I always say in January is when this is going to happen. Disney has until December 1st to determine the fair market value of Hulu. They will determine this by having a bank appointed by each side, one by Comcast, one by Disney, agree on a number. In fact, if they can't agree on a number, those two banks get to invite a third bank in to agree on the number. So they'll agree on a number. And then Disney will have 45 days to pay off whatever that number is. The final number Disney will pay is expected to be somewhere close to nine billion. It depends on exactly how much they determine Hulu was valued as of September 30th, but it'll be around nine billion somewhere, probably a little south of that. Once Comcast is out of the picture, Disney won't worry about accidentally making Hulu worth too much. That's been a concern. They don't want to push Hulu before Comcast exercised its option. They knew that they could force Comcast to exercise its option at some point. So they've been playing a little cautious, which means once this is all done, Disney could expand Hulu overseas, which would greatly increase its value. They could combine it with Disney Plus, which if nothing else would complicate its value. They could sell it off to somebody else. Disney will also know just how much cash it has to spend on Hulu and therefore, whether it's worth selling off any other parts of its business to which everyone says ESPN, please sell me ESPN. Disney's Bob Eiger has said he wants to keep ESPN, but he is considering partnering on streaming or selling a minority stake in it. In fact, you may not realize this, but Hearst owns 20 percent of ESPN. So 36 percent of it could still be in play and Disney still retain a controlling interest. B of A Global Research listed the NBA, the NFL, Amazon, Verizon and even Comcast as possible companies interested in buying a stake in ESPN. Which is basically everybody that could possibly want a stake. So they don't really know. Justin, are you as excited as I am that the starting gun has been fired and that we're about to see the streaming market just go into even further disarray? Well, I think actually this is the moment where we begin the array part. Yes, right. We have been in disarray. This entire process has hung over every decision that has been made in the world of entertainment for the last five years. And we've specifically seen some of the issues come to the fore in the one strike that was resolved, the WGA strike and the one strike that's ongoing, the SAG-Abstra strike. Part of the reason why these strikes have been so pernicious is because the people on the other side of the bargaining table don't know who they're going to work for. They don't know if they're going to be a boss or an employee by the time that whatever contract that they sign, even a short one ends. And this is why, because as soon as the reason why Disney was being very coy and annoying about Hulu, saying, I don't know, maybe, maybe Comcast will buy us. Who knows what's going to happen is because like you pointed out, they didn't want to drive up the price of what they knew they were going to be contractually obligated to buy. Now we're here and from here, everything is possible. We can see Paramount sell. We can see Comcast sell. We can see Disney sell. The big question is who's going to buy? And right now on the board, you've got Disney that is not in the best financial situation. There's a reason why they're looking to take on another buyer in ESPN. What was once their cash cow, by the way, interview with their old CEO, John Skipper said that at the height of ESPN, cable rights fees predominantly for ESPN brought in more profit to Disney than the parks and the studio combined. If you want a sense of what ESPN used to make for Disney, those days are long gone. In my mind, how long gone are they, though? I know, you know, well, no. Yes, because of court killing. That's the reason why that number was so high was because everybody who got cable had to pay for ESPN, whether or not you watched it. And the reality of cable declining is ESPN just makes less money, a lot less money at this stage. The only people that can actually just pick and choose whatever they want to buy are the tech companies. Apple, Amazon, maybe Google, if they want to get into it, although they're not nearly on the same level as Apple and Amazon. I got that NFL Sunday ticket. Absolutely. They're dabbling for sure. I mean, that's more of the dabbling, really, yeah. Yeah. And on the board now are a lot of very big brands, brands that that actually matter for the world of entertainment and in news and in sports. Apple spent a lot of money on MLS and then talked the Lionel Messi to play in a closet in Fort Lauderdale so they can monetize the rights package that they are willing to spend. The question for me is who does Apple buy? Who does Amazon buy? And then from the remainder's, which old Hollywood conglomerate essentially binds together? Apple doesn't buy things as often as people want them to buy things. So I'm always resistant to people saying Apple should buy this. Apple should buy this. Apple should buy Netflix. Apple's never going to buy Netflix. Netflix didn't want to sell itself. I never bought that. But there is a world where Apple buying Disney does make sense. It's the exception that proves the rule. I'm I'm still 50 50 on it. But I'd say if Apple were to buy anything big, they might buy smaller things. But if they were to able to buy anything big, it would be Disney. Otherwise, I think they go for small fish and contracting. But Apple would love to have all that intellectual property. They would love to have the ESPN sports streaming rights that they could then use in their own products. Yeah, I guess we'll see. Tom, January, we need it. We need a name for this. We need like like a patent wars or something. Kind of a name because there's going to be a lot of these stories. Jen Pocalypse, I don't know. We'll work on Jen Pocalypse working title. I think I knew her in college, Jen Pocalypse. She's Jen Pocalypse. Yeah, you remember her. She was fine and she just kind of ruined every party. But because she was always console. Yeah, well, your your naming your naming nominations accepted at feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. I think I think I'm going to call Paramount Plus first of all, pair or not Paramount Plus Paramount. Paramount will be the first to fall. It's there'll be a lot more talk about Warner Brothers Discovery. But I bet somebody snaps up Paramount and I bet it's going to be somebody unexpected like Amazon or something. I wouldn't doubt it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Colin, a film producer and director who wrote in about our discussion with Charlotte Henry from Monday Show about horror movies and how horror movies might be money makers in their own way. Colin says, you're right. Horror generally is a smaller money making business. They cost less because they make less. There's they also require lesser stars to be marketable largely because there is an established audience for horror as a genre. Crucially, though, this makes it easier to put together and fund a horror project, especially as an independent producer. Making a big sci-fi project, for instance, is effectively impossible independently. If you make a drama, it'll never be distributed without any less talent and you'll never get them. So horror is a realistic business model, meaning you get more horror movies from more diverse sources than many other genres. Colin goes on to say, however, there is a degree to which horror is a filmmaker genre. Horror movies call for more stylistic work from the camera and image than a typical rom-com, for instance. I've made quite a few rom-coms, says Colin. In horror, you get to paint with bolder cinematic strokes. Directing a rom-com, you're working on performance to get the nuance of a relationship just right. Directing horror, I get to try to make you afraid of a doorway. It's fun. Oh, that's so great. Colin, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very good. We also got an email from Jason. That was scary. Jason wrote in about the scariness of ad blockers and said, I support ad-based content. One of the reasons I picked this email is he's one of the few people who took that position. I support ad-based content. With that said, my home network is protected by a piehole ad blocker. It does not block YouTube ads, but it does block many of the obnoxious and questionable ad networks. Some of the ad networks are accidentally or otherwise distributing malware or malicious software that doesn't get caught by anti-virus software and lands on your computer to initiate downloading more nefarious software. I have a budget of $30 a month to spend on Patreon and gladly pay for great content. Oh, Jason, that's music to our ears, of course. Thank you for that. And and yes, this is a great point that Jason wasn't the only one to make. But one of the reasons people block ads that we didn't talk about on the show was malicious ads. It's not as big of a deal now as it used to be. In fact, one of the patrons was commenting like it's kind of weird that the success of targeting has made ads safer over the years, which is an interesting point. But but yeah, there are still malicious ad networks out there. And what Jason is doing is blocking those while letting legitimate networks in, which means YouTube doesn't get blocked because YouTube is not using those malicious ad networks in this case. Well, you know who isn't malicious? Justin, Robert Young, let folks know where they can keep up with your work when you're not with us, Justin. Well, you can download know a little more. The season that we've been working on for the last few months is coming to a close, one more episode after this, but you can listen to Tom. Explain so many things this season on know a little more. Go ahead and check it out. This week's episode is about authenticator apps, and it was suggested by Big Jim, the trade nerd. He's like, wait, how does this thing know that my code is right? If it's not using the internet? So I'm like, oh, that's a good question. And I researched it and found it out. So thank you, Jim, for that. And everybody else gets to benefit from that answer at know a little more.com. Yeah, you you found out, Tom, you found out. I after round the internet until I found out. And then you found out, yeah, which is which is the point. Just a reminder, you can catch this. Wait, wait, wait, patrons. I almost forgot patrons. Patrons should stick around for good day internet because we're going to talk about that new Beatles song that they used machine learning to complete. It's the last Beatles song they promised this time and they use machine learning. Is that a good idea? They promised it last time, but, you know, yeah. All right, just a reminder. Our show is live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, twenty hundred UTC. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. And we'll be back tomorrow talking about the UK's role in the ongoing AI debate with Nate Langston joining us. Talk to you that this show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.