 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you the listeners Thanks to every single one of you including James C. Smith, Miranda Janell and Justin Zellers Coming up on DTNS Netflix begins its battle against password sharing and Samsung launches new flagship Galaxy S23 phones and some I'll say it smart looking laptops This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday, February 1st 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson from Columbus, Ohio I'm Rob Dunwood and I'm the show's producer Roger chain. Oh My friends we have some stuff to talk about today. So let's get right into the quick hits Peacock will no longer offer its free ads free with ads tier to new subscribers That tier is the one that lets you watch a more limited selection, but still had lots of stuff in it Without having to pay new subscribers will only be able to pay You'll get either the 499 a month premium plan with ads or the 999 a month premium plus tier with no ads as a choice if you're signing up now the free tier However, we'll still be offered to current subscribers if they cancel or lose access after a complimentary Subscription expires. Let's say your cable company was giving you a year at the end You'd be able to keep going with the free one in other cord cutting news Apple launched its major league soccer season pass $15 a month $99 for the whole season on the Apple TV app gives you access to MLS matches Audi 2023 MLS Cup playoffs the leagues cup and a bunch of original content last summer Apple signed a 10-year deal for streaming rights to major league soccer with no blackouts Tuesday PayPal said it plans to lay off 2,000 employees around 7% of its workforce President and CEO Dan Shulman blamed a challenging macroeconomic Environment for the cuts but added the company has made progress focusing resources on core priorities in right-sizing its cost structure But it's not just PayPal or Google or Facebook or Microsoft the list goes on Intel announced its cutting management pay across the company with CEO Pat Gessinger taking a 25% cut to his base salary And the rest of Intel's leadership team salaries being cut by 15% senior manager will take a 10% reduction mid-level managers 5% reduction Making a big deal out of your manager pay cuts smart move Intel in this climate Rivian also had some layoffs today So in a rough market for chip makers AMD announced it beat analyst Expectations to a pulp in Q4 earning 69 cents a share on revenue up 16% of the year But really the point is AMD did well the growth didn't come from the client group That's the group that does the consumer CPUs the CPUs that show up in the stuff you buy Sales were down 51% in that group its graphics business revenue was not the source It fell 7% on the air with a fall in GPU sales That was somewhat offset by growth in its semi-custom chips used in game consoles its data center business They were selling chips to data centers up 42% its embedded chip business also Way outperformed it was starting from a small base, but up 1,868 percent on the air that is mostly due to sales from its xilinx acquisition, which is now being rolled into it In its q4 earnings snap reported it grew daily active users 3.3% from last quarter to 375 million just below analyst estimates It also reported it surpassed 2 million subscribers to a snapchat plus service The company narrowly missed analyst expectations on revenue of 1.3 billion virtually flat on the year While it beat estimates on earnings at 14 cents per share I keep thinking snaps just gonna fade away and it does not they keep they keep hanging on resilient Yes, I thought you said resilient for me Open I don't even know what that would mean. I don't know. Yeah open a I launched a pilot subscription called chat gpt Plus you may recall that earlier in january. They they were doing a private test of a 42 dollar a month pro subscription This is the result of that test. So it's not going to be called pro It's called chat gpt plus the free tier of chat gpt is not going away. They wanted to make sure everybody didn't freak out You're still going to be able to get there But if you pay you get access during peak times you get faster response time out of the thing Because your requests get put to the front of the queue and you get priority access to new features So new features of chat gpt will show up for you before they show up for the free tier open a I says It's looking into some lower cost plans business plans Data packs where you can just pay as you use it in addition to an api That's all in the works. But for now, it's the one plan chat gpt plus available for $20 a month in the us all right Let's talk Netflix the battle begins rob Yes, so netflix updated its help center outlining changes to its password sharing policy enforcement It will require users to connect to the wi-fi at a primary residence once every 31 days to make them trusted devices Users trying to sign in elsewhere from an untrusted device will be asked to create their own account Travelers can request a temporary code that will be used on other devices for up to seven days Users can transfer profiles to other accounts to migrate watch history and recommendations Yeah, so this is going to bring up a lot of questions. Uh, how are they telling if I left my house? Well your ip address mostly Uh, they're gonna know By that whether you're on your home network or not. They they say wi-fi, but if you're wired It's still going to work the same way. They're going to look at your device id's and say well, wait Do these device id's always login from an external, uh, ip address? Nah, that might might mean it's not in the household They're going to look at account activity to kind of be able to tell this seems like a different person And they're going to combine all that together to figure out. Okay Is this device at home or not now? Like you said rob You can request a temporary code if you're traveling But the nice thing about that 31 day check in you mentioned is that will put your Device on an approved list you'll be able to uh, if you log in once every 31 days on your ipad or on your On your windows laptop that device from then on will will for the next 31 days Will not be subject to that travel block So that that's good if you're just using something at home if you take it with you The seven-day thing is only like oh, I never use this. It's a corporate laptop or or it's a hotel Roku or something like that so theoretically Scott and I were talking about this on on tms this morning If you have a a son or daughter who's not living with you but using your netflix account and they live nearby They could just bring their laptop or a tablet over to your house log in and watch something Once every 31 days and be golden Yeah, I was I was thinking a little bit more about what that would mean for nick my son who does share an account and he's you know Upcoming poor and starving artist trying to save money where he can so I was like sure you can use our Our password and you need it. He's here once a week for laundry and food I may as well just say hey log in once and you're good And I don't know that may be a lot of people And maybe that's bad. Well bad for netflix that they're not covering that that particular outlier because Maybe there's more of those maybe there's more people like my son who are going to still get their free Access to the thing and all they got to do now is just make sure to log in once in a while Well, here's a question that I have because I have a child who lives with me but goes to school four or five states away So they don't come home every 31 days So does this mean now that because they can't come and log in and become a trusted device every month that they have to Get their own account and when I say they I mean me because I can On this person's life Yeah, yeah, hopefully they can work around that because this person still lives with me. They just go to school somewhere else Yeah, no, I I think you're going to run into that question quite a bit Where you where you have someone who's in that exact situation? You got thousands and thousands of people in that exact situation Those are the edge cases. I'm curious about amos Our technical producer lives in alaska and his wife is stationed in washington They travel back and forth. They're not always in the same state, but they are definitely the same household How are they supposed to keep their do they need two accounts one for the alaska house one for the washington house? Granted that one's probably a little less common than the one you're talking about rob But I think that's where we're going to see the headlines here Which is netflix estimates around 100 million accounts out there are being shared They know that if they block those most of them aren't going to pay It's not about that. It's about getting the one percent, you know, that's still a million accounts If they can get a very small percentage to pay Then they raise their their cost a lot of people are saying Well, I'm going to cancel and I know you who just said that to your podcast player Are telling the truth, but a lot of people who say that they don't they don't end up canceling They just go ahead and and take the easy way out. So and netflix knows that My question is how many of these kinds of edge cases or unique scenarios Is netflix going to push And then cause a backlash and then have to have to scale back What what are those things when it goes to scale they're going to discover Are bigger pain points than they expected the one thing I was thinking about earlier today after we spoke on the morning show was In cases like rob and I where we've got somebody in our family who is sharing the account And we're paying for it Maybe they just need to be more creative about what a family plan might look like And there are plenty of examples out there of family plans with Spotify, apple music other other sources of entertainment where you can save a little money spend a little extra money But save money on You know multiple people or whatever and I just think maybe a little more fluid that way and maybe that will follow this When they're presented with whatever the results are and they can make some of those adjustments for I think our common situation that we just both described But until then I think we're going to have to wait and see what the You know what the aftermath is of the change and they tested the ability to do a low-cost add-on for an out-of-house Old member and apparently that test did not prove useful because that it does not look like they're rolling that out As part of this what they are doing is saying hey if you are on the top tier Platform will keep you happy with new features Netflix announced spatial audio now available on more than 700 titles with plans to add it to popular new titles at launch The full spatial audio catalog is available on the premium tier. There's some available on standard and basic Uh, but all of it is available on the premium tier and they expanded The number of devices you can have downloads on from four to six Uh, I don't know how many people that really helps, but you know that that does loosen it up A little bit and each device can have up to 100 titles downloaded. So it's it's it's a it's plenty of room To download stuff. Uh, so yeah, maybe that will just keep you all happy as long as you're paying $20 Samsung galaxy unpacked happened this morning and uh, we got exactly what we expected A couple of laptops and a handful of phones Rob Dunwood, are you still a galaxy user? Oh, I am definitely still a galaxy user and tom. I actually did my due diligence I got up and I watched That one hour. I appreciate that they kept it to 59 minutes and 47 seconds. It was right on target It actually ended abruptly. I was like, oh, wow, it's over. Uh, you know at the end of it, but um, Here's my my big take. Uh, these phones the, uh, you know, that's 23 line They all look beautiful. They all they all are probably going to be great phones But I just got the feel that unless you really just have to have a new camera like for me. I've got an s22 Um ultra I didn't see a compelling reason that I would upgrade because it was literally camera camera camera camera camera camera camera camera camera and a few new things that the the phone can do That seems to be the case with phones upgrades from everybody these days. Everything is incremental over the last version. So yeah you've got a little nicer screen, a little better brightness, a little better battery, and almost all of the major updates are in the camera. When you're looking at the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, it's a 200 megapixel camera which you're never going to need. But the point of that is that it bins those pixels into 16 pixel bins and makes like a really good 12 megapixel image. There's optical image stabilization improvements. Interestingly, they dropped the resolution of the selfie cam from 40 megapixels to 12, I think pointing out that you don't really need more than 12 out of your selfie camera. But yeah it's a slightly less rounded design for easier grip on the S23 Ultra. You may or may not even notice that. The S23 and the S23 Plus are both exactly the same design. These are great phones. Don't get me wrong, but I agree with you Rob. They don't look materially different than the S22. I mean there is the whole thing of like what do you want out of your next phone? And the answer is almost always incremental. But the one place you do feel like Samsung and others show off the biggest jumps are in image processing, AI stuff and the camera itself. And so I feel like that is going to be the number one thing moving forward for at least the next 10 years on our handhelds. Sometimes it'll be cool innovations like scrolling displays or folding displays or whatever new cool tricks people have up their sleeves. Samsung certainly doing that with foldables these days. But at the end of the day, the thing you're using the most on your phone often is your camera and that's a place you can show real progress. And so I'm not surprised that that's happening here. It's happening with Apple. It's happening with everybody. And I still think that's a reasonable reason to upgrade. If you're a couple of years behind and you're like, yeah, I could use a new camera. I think this is just kind of where we're at. It feels like it's almost like with computers and desktops, it became how fast was your video card and how big is your screen? But for a long time, that wasn't really in the mix. It was all sorts of things. It was motherboards and CPUs and everything else. It's storage and all that's all that all kind of narrowed down to this interface thing of what am I looking at all the time? And what am I doing all the time? And that's usually video and it's usually display. And in a way, this is marrying that it just happens to be camera. Yeah, the camera, the camera improvements seem pretty impressive. And I got to say, you know, I was impressed by, you know, Ridley Scott made a movie. I think it was no, you know, no, no Kim Jong made a movie. Yeah. And it was really impressive what they can do when they take these 1000 to 1200 dollar phones and attach them to millions of dollars worth of production equipment, you know, the kind of movies that they can produce out of them. So that part was like, okay, you can really do some cool things making movies with these phones. But this is not just when you put it on a selfie stick and go do stuff. I was looking at literally ND filters that costs three to four times with the phone's cost. So you kind of have to take that, you know, with a grain of salt when you can absolutely make movies on these phones that are production quality that could be shown in theaters, but they're still an enormous amount of equipment and production that goes into that just like whoever color graded these things were wizards, I would love to, you know, to meet those people who did the color grades on these movies. Yeah, these are these are good phones. And I think we are we are in the world where you don't go get the new Samsung Galaxy phone, you go get a new Galaxy phone because your old one is getting slow or you broke it or lost it. And when you go to the store, the new ones have some new features that weren't around the last time you were there. But you don't need to get a new one every year. These are where we're moving into that commoditization where, you know, just just like with, with dishwashers and washers and dryers, you don't run out and buy the new one every year because it's got new features. But when you do need a new one, you'll look and see like, oh, there's some cool new features in these dishwashers now that I can take advantage of they run quieter. I got smart sensing, water efficiency, whatever, right? And I think we're at that point where Samsung's pitch seems to be more about come into the Samsung universe than it is that Galaxy S 23 itself, you know, is a phone you need to replace your S 22 with. I think that Samsung, even in the event, they kind of made some overtures to we know that everybody's not going to upgrade to just bought a phone in the last year, maybe two. So one of the things that I thought was quite refreshing was that a lot of the software features that you're going to see coming on these new devices, well, they're going to come to your old devices as well. That's not available today. But they did say that you're going to actually be able to get like one UI 5.1 relatively soon. So that for me means that well, if I can upgrade my existing 22 that is not even a year old yet, if I can just upgrade that with, you know, with software and maybe not get the finest of the camera refinance, but everything else kind of works the same. Then I don't really need to upgrade and you know, one thing that Samsung did is at the end of their presentation, they really talked a lot about sustainability and just making sure that they're using recycled, you know, you know, you know, glass or using recycled plastics. That's all good for the environment. What is also good for the environment is not buying a new phone every single year. Yeah. And, and honestly, I think what Samsung's doing there is saying, well, we'd we'd rather keep you on an old phone and happy with us, and maybe sell you a laptop or a tablet that works with it. So we want to push that software out to the old phone. So you might widen out into our universe, which leads us to the laptops. Just in case anybody's interested, the S23 Ultra starts at 1199.99. The S23 Plus, which is the 6.6 inch display, starts at 999. And the 6.1 inch S23 starts at 799. All of those are available to order now shipping February 17. Let's talk a little bit about these laptops, because I think this is their play to convince you to come into the wider Samsung universe. They talked a lot to the press about how these compared to MacBook Pros. So the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra 16 inch laptop 2880 by 1800 120 Hertz refresh rate screen 16 nits runs off of a core i7 or a core i9 h series Intel processor has Nvidia RTX 4050 or 4070 graphics. If those don't mean anything to you. These are these are good specs, maybe not the very best. These aren't like video game playing specs, but very good specs for a laptop. Lots of connectivity HDMI micro SD Thunderbolt for USB C 3.5 millimeter audio jack. But the thing they pushed the most was the capability. So Samsung has something called multi control, which means you can control multiple Samsung devices, your phone, your tablet from the laptop keyboard and the laptop trackpad or an attached mouse. Samsung second screen can use a galaxy tab as a second monitor. Quick share let you transfer your files between Samsung devices. You can share cut and paste you can you can move web tabs between the browsers on the various devices. Book 3 Ultra starts at $2,399.99, which is exactly $100 less than an entry level MacBook Pro 16 and is shipping February 17th. Rob, what do you think of this? Did this did they tempt you to widen out a little bit in that Samsung universe? Put potentially on the PC side, I have been for decades a Dell person, but I did raise my eyebrow because what I noticed and you may mention to this, they're really trying to get you into a Samsung ecosystem. So one of the things that made me say, oh, that's kind of cool was you have this new laptop, you have your Samsung S 23 your S 22. You set it down next to it and you can just automatically are now Wi Fi tethering to the phone. You don't have to actually manually go through the process. First world problem. I know that it saves you 12 seconds, but that was kind of cool. So it gave me that Apple feel to where when you're inside the walled garden, it's awesome in here, you know, with with Samsung devices, things like you get the spatial audio when you are listening with earbuds or the Galaxy Buds Pro 2. You know, those type of things, those all just gave me, you know, kind of feelings of like, this is how Apple would do this. So it was like when I saw the price, I was like, that's interesting, exactly $100 less than a comparable MacBook. So I didn't see anything wrong with these devices. I really would want to get them, benchmark them, put them through the paces and compare them clearly against, you know, Apple devices, but also compare them against other PCs as well. Now, if that $2,400 makes your eyes water, there is the Samsung Galaxy Book 3, which starts at $1,499 for the Pro and the Book 3 Pro 360, which starts at $1,899, both those ship in February 17. But those are 13th gen core processors, IrisX graphics, up to 32 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM, but that's not the entry level spec there. And decent looking screens, 2880 by 1800 as well, 120 Hertz AMOLED. But you know, those are steps down from the Ultra. Scott, did any of these lure you away from the MacBook universe? How did you think they compared? Well, I keep looking at Samsung for the potential of taking more care for creatives and doing the kind of stuff that would like drive software development on their platforms that would rival things like Procreate and various other kinds of apps. I'm speaking mostly of digital art here, but so every once in a while when something like this comes out, I'm like, okay, what are we doing over there? How are we doing with styluses? What's going on? Okay, well, Photoshop's an option, but how about the tablet? That's a little bit different and Android development for those kinds of apps is a little bit slow. Nothing here's jumping out at me, but I'm with Rob on the ecosystem play here. I really like that with my Mac ecosystem and iPhone and iPad. I like being able to have all those things working together, mirroring screens, moving information back and forth very quickly and easily. Having that be more of a grouping of devices rather than three very separate disparate devices. And this is a move in that direction and that's really interesting to me. And it's something I think even Microsoft suffers from not doing very well with their various devices. I'm always looking at them for the same thing. It's like, how are you doing over there for creatives? And they never quite get it, but these are nice. Also, I'm kind of sick of silver. I wouldn't mind a black notebook. I'd love that look. So they have me there. Nice job, Samsung. They're nice looking. They kind of look similar to all the laptops these days. They've all sort of converged on a style, but I don't mind that style. I like that style. Also, the world's biggest phone maker made a VR AR headset announcement, and it was an Apple. Samsung at the very end of this said they are working on extended reality wearable devices. So that's AR and VR. It will run on Google's version of Android for wearable displays. Qualcomm CEO was on stage talking about chipsets, and this is going to run on a Qualcomm chipset. They also said there's going to be partnerships with Meta and Microsoft. I'm guessing for software. So access to the VR worlds of those two companies. More to come there. They didn't really make any detailed announcement. I think they just wanted to get out there and say it before Apple did some time later this year. No details. That's a bummer, as you mentioned. I just wish we would have got a little something out of those guys. Because in some way Samsung's on the forefront of that. They did the thing with Oculus early on, and it was a little janky and weird, but that Oculus put your phone inside your headset thing was kind of cool, and it was new, and nobody else was really doing it, and everybody kind of followed suit after that, and we've tried a million things since, and it's come a long way. So it's nice to see them saying, hey, we haven't, you know, completely forgiven or forgotten all of that. We still have ideas. Yeah, I think it's good, but I'm with you, Tom. I think this was announced because they just want to be in front of Apple making the announcement. I think those plans are still real loose. It felt a little like first, you know, just want to be first in the comments. If you're having a bit of a time putting your vacation itinerary together these days, well, why haven't you tried chat GPT? The amateur traveler did. Here he explains. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Some people are trying a new use for chat GPT in the travel space and that's itinerary planning. There's even a site you can go to called journeyai.com that will combine chat GPT's output with Google Maps, but you can do this yourself by just going to chat GPT and saying something like generate a 10-day itinerary for travel to Japan displayed as a table with one column being the place name and the second column being how many days to spend in that place and it will generate you a nice table of an itinerary. Now it wouldn't do it in this order. It doesn't seem to know how things are organized, but you could switch it around and it's an interesting place to start. I wouldn't use it and immediately book a ticket and go there. Certainly blogs and podcasts can help with that as well, but it might give you some ideas of some places that you weren't thinking about. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Thank you, Chris. Yeah. I just, what can't it do? I just had a thought that maybe that's not even Chris. That's an AI version of his voice that he wrote the text for in chat. He said write my next amateur traveler and the chat GPT wrote it about itself. Yep. And then there's some voice stuff out there that blew my mind last week. And I think, I don't know, man, now it's no longer, I now, I now no longer assume that these things are real. That's just in case someone surprises me and you say, oh, by the way, Chris was generated by an AI today and I'll be ready to hear that information and I'll lose my mind. I've been saying it for a couple months. The world changed November 30th. The world changed. Not wrong. You're not wrong. If either one of you are real, I don't even know anymore. I don't know. Yeah. All right. Scott, whether you're a chat GPT or the real Scott, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. There is an email address that went to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. This is Rob, not our Rob that's here right now, but a different Rob also with two B's. He writes in and says, hi, Nikki and DTNS crew. I have heard you all talk about the haiku box many times. I have been using the Raspberry Pi with a $10 lapel mic and it runs outside and runs freely, or sorry, and run the freely available software from BirdNet Pi. I have a pretty good experience with this. It's not as clearly presented as a commercial product and everything is done through the web UI, but it works and is very good at a significantly lower cost. That is very cool. Thank you, Rob. We'll pass that along to Dr. Nikki as well. We'll have a link to the GitHub for the BirdNet Pi project as well in the show notes, dailytechnewshow.com, so for anybody that wants to check that out. Big thanks to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us. What you got going on these days? Oh, so many things. I'll just send you to the central hub for it all. It's at frogpants.com. Lots of stuff on podcasts. My board game is coming along. My new one, everything's going a little crazy over there. Do you want to follow any of it? Find a podcast that's to your liking or otherwise, just hang out. You can find it all at frogpants.com. I spend a large portion of my listening week with Rob Dunwood between the SMR podcast and the Tech John, and it is worth every second I spend on it. Rob, what's going on at those places this week? Well, you know what? Lamar Wilson worldwide, the world famous superstar that we all know. He actually listened to the last episode of the Tech John and sent me a nice tweet saying, man, you guys did it on this one. So yeah, go check out our latest episode of the Tech John. You saw it at thetechjwn.com and you can check out what I'm talking about over there. Yeah, you can pretend you're just hanging out with Rob and Terrence and Stephanie and me and Lamar because you know we're listening as well. Go do it, thetechjohn.com. Also, brand new bosses. We had a couple of days without anybody signing up for the Patreon. I was getting a little wordy, but Michael and Nicholas came to our rescue. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Nicholas. Our most recent bosses and you are very welcome. Join the club. There's a few thousand other bosses in there to welcome you at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks, Michael and Nicholas. Patrons, like Michael and Nicholas, stick around. I'm going to find out a little more about what's going on with Samsung and Android with Mr. Rob Dunwood here. We're going to have a longer conversation. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.