 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thank you to all of you, including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, and John and Becky Johnston. Coming up on DTNS, can the modem get you food in 10 minutes? How real do you want your social networks? And does the Mac Studio hold secrets? DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 21st, 2022 from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple's latest Apple TV update has removed the option to buy and rent movies from the Apple TV app on Android TV and Google TV, though previous movie purchases are still available. Apple TV's app came to both Google TV and Android TV last year, offering Apple TV plus access, channels and rentals and purchases from iTunes directly on the device. A new How to Watch message states, you can buy, rent or subscribe in the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad and other streaming devices. Oh, the irony, the irony. The Verge reports that the most recent Windows 11 release preview build adds a watermark to the desktop. So if you're using a workaround to run the operating system on an unsupported hardware device, you will now see a system requirements not met notice asking you if you want to visit settings to learn more. There don't appear to be any feature limitations, however, just a nudge. A Moscow court banned Facebook and Instagram in Russia with the judge ruling the app's activities as extremist. You may be saying, didn't they already do this? Well, Russia's communications regulator, Roscoe Nodzor, already blocked access to the apps. The extremist designation opens the door to bringing criminal charges against meta employees in Russia, although I don't believe their reporting says that there are no meta employees in Russia at the moment. WhatsApp does still remain available in the country. Foxconn announced it basically resumed normal work order and production operations at its factory campuses in Shenzhen following shutdowns due to spreading of COVID-19 infections in the city. The company coordinated with local government last week to start resuming operations by arranging for some staff to live and work in a bubble on the campuses. Basically. The New York Times reports that Brazil lifted its ban on the messaging app Telegram after its Supreme Court blocked the app late last week. The app's reinstatement came after it made changes to combat misinformation. This includes things like removing classified information, labeling posts with false information, promoting factual sources and monitoring Brazil's 100 most popular Telegram channels. All right, Rich, let's talk a little bit more about getting dinner in a really quick way. Yeah, we've seen some companies try and do like really fast grocery delivery, but the delivery service Zomato announced that we'll launch a new service called Zomato Instant next month. It's offering 10 minute delivery for food, not groceries. That's a number of startups have tried that. Zomato even in fact has tried it a couple of times, kind of hasn't stuck as a permanent feature for their service. No, Zomato Instant's offering hot prepared food to you 10 minutes after ordering. And this will initially launch in Zomato's home city of Guru Gram in India. So obviously just launching this in a test market. A lot of questions about this, I guess the first one, Sarah, there's obviously a utility for it, right? I mean, 10 minutes like stresses me out. It's like so close to when I'm ordering it. I don't know, just the idea of it being so close. I mean, is that just off the bat, like does the window of that seem reasonable to you? It does not at all. However, I will say, and I have not been to Guru Gram in India specifically, but I know that getting fresh food delivered, for lunch and dinner when somebody is off working is very, very commonplace and a lot of the Indian subcontinent. And that is sort of part of life and fresh, delicious food is also part of life there. So I can see where the market for this would be big, but how do you... I mean, okay, so I live in the woods. I mean, I'm not too far from civilization, but I'm really not close enough to any kitchen to be 10 minutes away to get it delivered fresh. So my question is, what exactly is being delivered? And when was it made? That's the question. Roger, you have experienced the food industry, your family does for sure. I mean, what red flags do you like see? Like how this is possible? That's the red flag, 10 minutes. I mean, all right. So let's just say, let's for argument's sake that it's not cooked food, it's a packaged food. 10 minutes is still a pretty tight stretch for delivery, right? Especially if you're in an urban center with a lot of traffic, a lot of pedestrians, a lot of obstacles to overcome. Now, if you could put in there, we're gonna cook your food. I mean, I don't know about you, but cook times on the short side is 10 minutes unless you are like microwaving your reheated leftovers or you're already bringing food in from something that's already been cooked, but something that Sarah was alluding to, like for example, a buffet style table where you cook all the food ahead of time, typically in the morning, you have it out. So hey, I want the mashed potatoes with the fried chicken and whatever else that you have. And you just kind of put those into portions and you put it in the box and you send it to a driver. No cooking involved, technically it's cooked, but it was cooked four hours or typically two hours ahead of time. Well, there's a couple of things that we do know like specifics about what Zamata is trying to do here. So the big news is that this isn't, it's not gonna be looking like they're gonna be squeezing their delivery drivers on us. In fact, they're saying they're not even gonna let their delivery drivers know that these are within these 10 minute window. These are just gonna be treated as standard food delivery orders from a driver perspective. And where they're saying they're gonna be able to cut that time and make that time possible is according to them, they're gonna be using a sophisticated dish level demand prediction algorithms, which sounds delicious and future ready in station robotics or kind of automated stuff. So the idea is if you have a restaurant with an extremely limited menu and the pre-show I refer raising canes is like a chicken place. They literally just do fried chicken. They know at lunchtime, they're gonna serve X amount of, like between the hours of 12 and two or whatever like that. And any given day, they're gonna make X amount of chicken, they can have that ready. And if you limit your menu and you know that through some analytics like, hey, we make so much of this dish every single day, you can have that and it's still have it within a reasonable window where it's not of a face style, where it's not four minutes out or four hours out or something like that. And still be able to have that already, right? I mean, that's the fast food model, right? That's where contrary to a popular belief, McDonald's doesn't cook 100 hamburgers and let some sit. They produce what they order and they anticipate, they can say, hey, we're gonna line up, we're gonna need about 20 Big Macs. So you get started on it. Right, yeah, based on what we know people will do at noon. You know. I mean, it could very well be a very limited item menu. It's probably gonna be a very popular dishes. So you're never gonna be left with any leftovers at the end because they're always gonna sell. But still, I mean, 10 minutes, more power to them. I would love to see how this works and exactly what they're offering because everything that goes in my mind says, yeah, you can either make it fast or you can make it good or you can make it cheap, but you gotta pick two here. And it's one of those things where, you know. This is also something that is just going to work in certain markets. Exactly, exactly. If you identify the market, great. And if you can get something to, you know, somebody that feels and tastes fresh within 10 minutes, that's pretty cool. But most markets can't actually, it's just not possible. Well, and to that point, Sarah, India, now obviously there are many, many markets within India, but in general, like this quick commerce delivery portion is an increasing part of the overall delivery marketplace there. Last year, 2021, 13% of all online grocery deliveries were within like a 20 minute window for them. So this is increasing, now obviously grocery and hot food delivery, different things, but this is an increasingly important market in India specifically and definitely one, you know, Zomato just announced that they're attending to acquire a blanket for $700 million. So this is something where they're very much investing in this space. Yeah, putting their money where their delivery mouth is. Well, listen, I wanted to succeed. I would love this option for myself. I would pay a premium if I'm like, I'm hungry. Can I get food in 10 minutes? Hot dinner food, not just like a bunch of groceries. I'd be into that. All right, moving on. As drones take on a lot more utilitarian purposes, they also have to be able to withstand a lot of elements. Depending on where you live and what you're using your drone for, it has to be pretty robust. Well, DJI might be best known for its consumer Mavic and Phantom drones. It also makes industrial-grade drones. They're hardy, but even its former top of the line M300 RTK drone wasn't recommended to fly in the snow or heavy rain. It's just, it's too much, too much element. However, DJI announced a new drone that's cleared to tackle those elements, the M30 Enterprise, able to fly in temperatures from 20 below to 15 degrees Celsius in rain, wind, or snow, and officially rated for IP55 weather sealing. Weather sealing is only part of the story because like DJI's consumer drones, the M30 folds down to be able to flip into a small rolling case weighing just 8.2 pounds, little guy, and be able to deploy without needing to screw into the arms like previous DJI Enterprise drones. Flight time is limited to 41 minutes. So there's the rub, but it also supports the use of the DJI dock, which is basically a drone in a box solution for autonomous deployments. Although that is limited in the U.S., at least at this time, regulations require drone pilots to stay within line of sight. So there is some room to grow there, but the M30, if you're interested at this point, starts at $10,000. And that is without the DJI dock either. That's like partnering that out right now. So we will see where that happens. That to me is the interesting side of the story because we've seen these ultra-portable drones, the Mavic's kind of changed the consumer drone landscape in terms of size and capability and that kind of stuff. There have been industrial drones for quite a while that can handle the elements and stuff like that. But what's interesting to me here is you have DJI taking a lot of those consumer-focused features and making it very easy so that you don't have to be, obviously you probably should be certified to operate a drone, but a lot of those autonomous flight features, a lot of that quick deployment features and stuff like that are gonna come in real handy where you could have one of these DJI docks on a fire truck or something like that. You could have these in very remote places that basically only need power because one of the things about this dock is it has a 4G dongle that you can put onto it. So it can maintain connectivity over a pretty wide range and it does fast charging and stuff like that. So yes, the flight time is limited, but really useful for remote drone applications. And emergency stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely a person who, I don't own a drone. I understand how they work and not all drones are equal, but it's just not, as a hobbyist thing, it's not something that I need. For an emergency device, I think that that $10,000 price point that people say, that's crazy. Why would you? I mean, for what you've described, Rich, it actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And there's some really interesting use cases for this. Another one is like emergency rescue because one of the things you can do with this is you can put on a radiometric thermal camera on this which basically detects surface temperature. So it's really good to detecting, hey, a warm body in an otherwise cold area and stuff like that. So, you know, you could very rapidly, and again, people use drones for this already. It's just, this is again, another simplification of this. And I'm sure it won't be the only one to do this, but like, again, this kind of all in one, I guess all in one packaging and combination of features, it makes me excited for the possibilities that we could see for this in ways. You know, when we hear a couple of years ago, we heard about drones being used to help fight wildfires or monitor wildfires and stuff like that. Something we hadn't really thought of before. That's what this kind of makes me think of. It's like, okay, we have a super connected, very ruggedized drone we can kind of put anywhere. What can we do with that? That's the exact- We'll say it's like think of helicopters and the fact that, you know, a high speed chase, you know, in wherever it is, you know, and the helicopter being able to help whoever's on the ground identify what's going on and get them to the situation closer than they would be able to otherwise. I mean, a drone is like 100 times better than the helicopter. If you know how to operate it correctly because it's small, it's light, you know, withstand the elements, you don't have to pay for like a huge amount of gas and a pilot. I mean, I do think this is the future of law enforcement, but also emergency services. And one of the big things I can totally see this for is maintenance, especially if you're in charge of a large skyscraper or building and you need to check through because oftentimes condominiums have this issue. There's a lot of structural issues that come with age and you can't always hire someone to come down and shimmy down the window cleaner equipment and then check everything, you know, individually you can just have it fly up and down and give you a quick overview because you say, okay, there's a spot we should really check out instead of having to wait on hiring someone specialized. And that, of course, adds time and complications. I mean, it's what you said, Rich, it's a turnkey solution. People don't have to think about it. You pay the one price and it should all work. All right, well, moving on here. Apple's switched to using its own silicon has gone relatively smoothly, all things considered. The M1 and its derivatives have provided efficient performance. It seems to scale from thin and light laptops to workstation. We just saw that with the Mac Studio with the reviews coming up for that. The big combo noted by a lot of reviewers and users, these new machines are entirely locked down, not upgradable. Now, even when going back to the days of x86 in recent years, Apple laptops have been completely locked down in terms of upgrades and stuff like that. The desktop side wasn't quite as bad. Users could at least upgrade memory on things like the recent iMacs and Mac Minis. And the refresh Mac Pro was kind of an open dream in comparison to a lot of other Apple products able to upgrade all sorts of stuff on that machine. The lack of upgradeability seems more apparent as Apple released that Mac Studio and that's kind of a pro workstation kind of model. Apple oddly describes it as modular, but outside of a healthy dose of IEO on the front and the back, seems a bit of marketing bluster, or maybe not. A teardown of the Mac Studio by the YouTube channel MaxTech revealed two M2 style connectors used for proprietary Apple SSDs. Indicating storage might be upgradable after purchase if Apple provided the parts in the video to actually take them out and take a look at them. These slots do not seem to accept standard M2 connectors, just a small short SSD like modules. Storage has been soldered onto all other Apple Silicon computers at this point. So this is kind of the, what's notable about is that there's any kind of connector at all that is in any way user accessible, even though you have to go through all sorts of Torx bits and other screws and stuff like that. Sarah, some Mac Studio secrets? Maybe, maybe. When I read the story this morning, I was sort of like, well, okay. I mean, there are lots of things that if you open up the guts of an Apple device you might say, hmm, interesting. Seems like maybe they've left room for expansion here but we just haven't seen it yet. So on one hand, I think, well, that might just be what this is. But at the same time, what is it? What is it for? Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is actually, I mean, there's always the possibility that this is some sort of diagnostic port. Apple does a ton of service in-store. So maybe this is something, it's a pro machine, obviously not something you just want a wholesale replace. Maybe this is a diagnostic port, always a possibility. But I've had this thought for a while now that Apple seems to be paying more than just lip service to things like sustainability, really pushing recycled materials, not just in cases, but like literally how their PCBs and their chips and stuff like that are put together, trying to at least emphasize and get very publicly that they're using a lot of reused and recycled materials, which is great, I'm not saying that. The fact that all of these are unupgradable seems like a completely missing chunk to this. And when I saw that there were these modules in here, it kind of got me thinking that I would not be surprised if down the road, and this is just based on me kind of seeing where there's an opening in the market here where Apple loves to sell you services, Apple loves to sell you stuff in the Apple store, if down the road you get some kind of in-place upgrade for these pro style machines, maybe not in a MacBook Air, even in a Mac Mini, but on the Mac Studio, whatever the upcoming Mac Pro refresh looks like, that you'll be able to go into the store, keep the same case, keep a lot of the same components, they switch out parts of the motherboard, but the processor to give you whatever the M2 is or something like that, you keep all that nice IO, none of that IO is going out of date anytime soon, and you can have that in-place replacement, and they just swap out the SSDs, they do some sort of secure thing, so it's all encrypted and they don't see any of it. And you're able to have that in-place and they can sell that to you, obviously, and I feel like that would be a greener solution than you even giving it to them and they recycle the case and everything like that, so again, this is just looking at the market, but to me, that would be a way that they could fulfill that modularity pledge when they announced this machine in a really meaningful way. If nothing else, hopefully someone can reverse engineer these and figure out how to make a third party part for these, right? I feel like the thing that Apple does, as you've explained, is things are proprietary, they're locked down, if you like to get inside and tinker, you have a soldering machine, like best of luck with an Apple product, they don't make it easy for you, but the fact that this seems to be like, oh, Apple may be opening the door for some possibilities in the future, but absolutely no marketing materials have said as such is why people are wondering now. Yes, the secrets. Well, if you have thoughts on what Apple is doing behind the scenes or you have thoughts on anything or want to hear about us talk about something specific on the show, one way to let us know is in our subreddit. Subreddit is fun, you can submit stories and vote on other stories at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, so we've got a lot of social media apps in the world, Rich. I have given up on keeping up on many of them. However, there are always more options. You think of Instagram, kind of the giant in the space of photo apps, VSCO is another app, both have thrived by building an aesthetic, you know? You want to show people your cool vacation, you look as good as possible, the light is glowing, et cetera. These apps include filters and editing tools to let users present that idealized, glamorized version of life. And we've seen some pushback because of that mental health consequences to these kinds of highly curated images that don't necessarily represent real life with Instagram's internal research finding that the app made some teenage girls feel worse about body image. So protocol covered, a new or social network that may appeal to you. It's looking to stand apart from that Instagram highly curated feed model, but doesn't embrace the pure ephemerality of something like Snapchat either, somewhere in between. It's called Be Real, B-E-R-E-A-L. And it lets users post just a single time per day. You want to post, you got to post just once. But it's not about limiting screen time, it's about creating a shared experience. So to explain, every day be real users in the same time zone, get a notification at the same time, time to post. From there, you have two minutes to post a simultaneous capture of your front and rear phone camera. So it's designed to be like, here's me and here's what I'm looking at, here's where I am. If you post late, not within the timeframe, you still can post, but your photo will be tagged noting you did not make the cutoff and did not play the game accordingly. The other differentiator is that you can't view the new post of the day until you post your own. So if you want to lurk and just look at everybody's posts all day, doesn't really work on Be Real. You have to participate as well. The app caught on in its home country of France with university students back in spring of 2021. So depending on where you live, you might be familiar with Be Real. I heard about it for the first time today. It's also trying to aggressively expand on US college campuses, which seems to be a good breeding ground for this kind of thing. I don't know, Rich, I like Instagram. I'm on Instagram every day. My dog has an Instagram account. So it keeps me quite busy, but I get the fatigue. I get the fatigue of all of this and I get the sort of a new social network saying, okay, so it's not about showing us that you have the best life ever. It's just where you are, what you're doing. But I don't know if that's too mundane for this to catch on in a widespread way. Yeah, that is the question is, how does this have staying power when it's just gonna be a bunch of people sitting around like an awkward selfie? But I wouldn't put it past people to develop some sort of a mean culture or just any kind of cultural practice around that. But what got me really interested in about this is it feels like very much the same dynamic as Wordle, right? Where it's like, you wake up, you open up Wordle on your phone or whatever and then like you do it and you're done for the day. Like the world. And you're not allowed to like obsess over it, you know? Yeah, you can't buy more life to it. Play it or you don't. Exactly, yeah. And it's like, yeah, and if you miss it for the day, it's like, oh, okay. And then you can share in everybody's, oh, okay, here's how you approach this. Now, there's a different dynamic there where it's like, oh, what were you doing at 10, 52 AM on a Saturday? Oh, you were sitting around near pajamas drinking coffee. That's great. Yeah, like the concept of it is very interesting to me. So I signed up for BReal. I know, I have some family in college. No one has signed up for it. So I am not perhaps representative of the college youth that like that. No, and they might be targeting, you know, back in that early Facebook days, it was the same. It wasn't like every college kid was like super into Facebook. But what I will say, even knowing that literally no one was going to see what I would post, I got the notification like, hey, it's time to post. You got two minutes. And it was like, that was, I could see that being a very anxiety inducing thing, especially if you're younger and you want, and you're like, like you have to be in with your friend group to be like, oh, why didn't you post? Oh, I can't see your post. You were talking about it. Well, and imagine if you're like, I don't know, in the shower or like, whatever is going on that day, you're like, can't, you know? I don't want the world to know. This is just not something I need to share with the world. It's a different dynamic for sure. It's a, yeah, like full reality versus a very shiny faux reality. And there's probably room for both. But I am interested, be real is a great example of, you know, does Instagram have a shelf life? I mean, you could argue that depending on usage around the world, we're already seeing signs of this, but what is next? What is the cool new thing? And I'm not even like gonna bring up TikTok and Snapchat because I think that they have their own markets, but is there a real life? We're all in it together, kind of social network that will emerge. And would it be something like be real? I do know that if they ever do try to monetize this, that there are a bunch of advertisers that would love to know that all your users are gonna be looking at your app at one, two minute increment during the day for like live promotion stuff. I could, like as a e-commerce thing, I could totally see the appeal for that. That's probably a waste on the road for be real though. Well, Rich, I have good news for you because I know you love the film. And I mean, of the DTNS crew, you are the film aficionado of our crew. So, Photo Products and Services Codec Moments, that's a division of Codec Alaris, has launched Codec Gold 200 film in a new 120 format five roll pro pack for medium format cameras. Now, if you don't have a medium format camera, you probably don't even know what it is, but those who do know and love it. Codec says it's designed for all photographers. You don't have to be an expert photographer, just somebody who's enthusiastic about getting into the medium format with the film combining warm saturated color, fine grain and high sharpness. Now, fans of medium format already know that the quality of scanned images is great for digital output and even when cropped because your negatives are bigger, but Rich, I know, I know you care about this. Isn't this something you've ordered? Okay, so they've started selling it to retailers, they haven't actually put it on sale to the public yet, which is very frustrating because I was looking to possibly buy some today. So for the video viewers, I have a 35 millimeter roll here and a 120 roll. So you can see just the negative is much taller and it's also like way wider. It's like that wide compared to a 35 millimeter negative. What's exciting about this is for years, kind of the dread that every person that enjoys film is it's like Fuji film is very notorious now for every seemingly every year taking away a film stock. There aren't a lot, especially color. Color is very hard to produce. It's very expensive to produce. And the scales that you need to make it work, basically there's three, maybe four companies that can do it. And so the fact for Fuji, even though Kodak Gold still exists in 35 millimeter to bring it to 120 is very exciting. It also speaks to them finally overcoming a lot of supply chain issues that they've had, not necessarily relative to the pandemic, but the issue with making film is that to spin up the machines to code it and stuff, you need to waste a lot of film, essentially, that's unusable to do so. So it only really makes sense for them to do it in big batches, but then if it sells out, there can go a long time where like literally every single place is sold out of Kodak Gold or Portra or something like that or Ektar. So the fact that Kodak feels confident enough to launch a consumer lower priced variant, probably lower margin also as well, tells me they wouldn't do this unless they felt like they could meet those supply challenges better. Maybe they're doing smaller, they figured out how to do smaller match productions more efficiently, that kind of stuff. So more film is better. Kodak has introduced film, reintroduced films in different formats before. Most recent was Ektochrome, I think in 2019, 2018, something like that, but to see a consumer relatively affordable film stock come back, very exciting in the world of film today. Yeah, it's good stuff. We had a conversation last Monday, I believe it was about vinyl and cassettes and CDs and all sorts of like throwbacky stuff coming back into vogue in certain circles. And this feels like just like the like absolute pinnacle of that trend is a medium format cool film from Kodak. It's glorious, I can't wait to get ahold of it. Kodak Gold, Kodak Gold 200, new 124 Matt, five roll. Remember to look out for photography news monthly next week in our feed for patrons. And we like to geek out on photography stuff in a little bit more detail. We cover the film news there too. Yeah. Indeed, indeed, indeed. Speaking of, thanks to all of our patrons, patreon.com slash gtns is where you can find out more about how to directly support the show. We also got a brand new boss over the weekend and you know who that boss name is, Nick. Nick just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Nick. You made my Monday. Woo, woo, woo, woo. There is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We've changed things up a tiny bit around here, but we've gotten really good feedback so far. So thanks to everybody who watches or listens to both shows. Want to know more, patreon.com slash dtns. Good Day Internet starts in just a few, but just a reminder that we are live on this here show Monday through Friday at four p.m. Eastern, 2,800 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we're back doing it all again tomorrow with Charlotte Henry. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.