 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Matt Zaglin, Kelly Cook, and Scott Hepburn. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft's new Thunderbolt 4 dock is getting a lot friendlier. Google says our bad about the whole Google Drive caps thing, and let's meet our new astronauts. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 4th, 2023, from lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rick Schiropolino. From Off Off Broadway, I'm IA's actor. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. Hey, we got IA's here, and that means we should probably get going with the quick hits. Here we go. In all of these months of massive Big Tech layoffs, Apple remained one of the few holdouts, but now Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple started its first round of layoffs since it began cost cutting measures late last year. We don't have estimated numbers, but it supposedly involves a small number of roles in its development and preservation teams, which works at construction and maintenance of global Apple facilities, including its retail stores. The social network post opened a public beta post launched in November 2022 with a closed beta when every other Twitter like social network suddenly saw a lot of interest. The platform's main draw was working with publishers to let users read articles directly in their feeds through micro payments. Publication partners include the Boston Globe Fortune, the Independent Insider, L.A. Times, ProPublica, Reuters, Semaphore, SF Chronicle, MIT Technology Review, USA Today, and Wired. Can't leave Wired out. Apple confirmed it placed its business in Germany on hold, but that it is not leaving the German market. This comes after Apple and OnePlus halted new smartphone sales in Germany last year due to a patent dispute with Nokia around 5G technology. Motorola announced a flagship phone for Western markets, the Edge 40 Pro. It's largely the same as the X40 released in China late last year with typical 2023 flagship specs, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, 165 Hertz screen, 125 watt wired charging and IP68 rated for water and dust. It comes to Europe in the coming days for 900 euros, then to Latin American markets. We still don't know if the device will come to North America, but Motorola said in its press release it's excited to share its commitment to expand the Edge family in North America this year. I'm glad Motorola is excited. That makes my day. PayPal's advanced checkout integration can now accept Apple pay payments from customers. Advanced checkout allows merchants to create more personalized checkout experiences for their shops. It's been around for a while, and it already has integration with Venmo, PayPal, and credit cards. It lets you get a more branded experience for a merchant. Advanced checkout also added the ability for customers to save cards to a secure vault for that particular business. The idea is a customer wouldn't need a PayPal account specifically, but could still have their card info saved securely with that merchant. All right, we've got some Microsoft news. They announced the Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock. It's a catchy name for $299.99. The new Dock connects with USB-C. That's notable because it doesn't use the proprietary Surface Connect port. Microsoft says it will keep selling its Surface Dock 2, which does include the Surface Connect port that it's made for Surface devices that don't have USB-C or Thunderbolt 4. Now, why is this interesting? It's because the Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock is the first to support devices other than Surface for the first time. Along with USB-C support, it also supports data transfer speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second and 96 watt charging using Thunderbolt 4. In front is a USB-C and USB-A port. In the back two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port, an audio jack and a security slot. But there's no SD card slot for some reason. So clearly Microsoft is trying to adapt to what it believes people need. Rich, so in the spirit of that, what do we need? Well, I guess the biggest question Microsoft is hoping is, do we need a Microsoft-specific Thunderbolt hub when, for the longest time, the big differentiator was, well, if you have a Surface device, the Surface Dock made a lot of sense. Honestly, for me the SD card is probably the biggest exclusion or if you're, I'm a photographer kind of guy, so maybe a CF express card slot if you want to be like super forward facing. But I don't know. I'm sure this is an extremely well made device. They're not price gouging. All of these Thunderbolt docks are right around that like 250 to $400 range. So this is right in the middle of that. If you look at something like OWC is the one I always think of when it comes to these kind of things. For me, this kind of lockdown thing, what I'm actually interested in is I want the framework version of a Thunderbolt dock. That's just a bunch of USB-C or Thunderbolt over USB-C ports on there and I can have little modules to kind of dock in there. I mean, does that sound crazy to you Is? That sounds like a very clean way to do pretty much what I think everyone's doing right now. You might get like two or three USB-C ports and then you got to attach a dock to that. And then you got to either have a dock that has more USB-C ports or they have USB-A ports and what's supposed to be a super clean, easy kind of system turns into what I'm looking at on my desk right now. This like looks like spaghetti everywhere. There's wires going everywhere because not everything uses C to C cables, not everything uses C to A cables. So you got to keep messing around with these old devices. Then you've got your legacy stuff like your micro USB to A. You got all of these freaking standards. The idea of the framework dock, if that was an actual thing where basically you're taking the dongle of making it like a little card, right? You're just going to have these small expansion ports. I think the concern is probably to buy the cost on that. If you're going to put Thunderbolt on these things, it's going to be pricey, pricey, pricey. You don't want like a ton of USB-C. Just label some like USB-C and they tell you it's like five gigabits and then one's 10 and then one's like 40 because it's got, I think it's USB, whatever. Somebody is going to get that one right in the comments somewhere. You have varying speeds. You don't have to pay to have all that power for every single port. Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting about this is it kind of completes the turnaround for Microsoft when it comes to this because the Surface Connector has kind of gotten a lot of flack in recent years for being like, that's this proprietary thing. We have USB-C. You have to remember when it first came out, it was 2014. It was pre, you know, the idea of, oh, we have this one port, Thunderbolt or USB-C that can kind of do everything. Apple didn't do, you know, that first generation of like we're doing all USB-C Thunderbolt ports until 2016, right? So you had, they were kind of following Apple's lead with MagSafe, except it was also a connector. Oh, this is like it does two and one. It's not just, you don't have to take up space on your laptop with just a connector. It can be this cool accessory port and they were going to carry it through for generations to allow you to, hey, you don't have to buy a new charger. When you get your new Surface device, all your accessories are still going to work with this cool port. And it just so happened that Thunderbolt and USB-C took off in a really huge way, no small part because of Apple, and kind of then made that a little bit of a collage, which is then weird because now Apple makes MagSafe again, which is basically a single use port that's taking up space that they got a ton of credit for, for reintroducing back into their laptop life. It's just a weird reversal for me on this. It is a bit strange. I'm thinking about the, the, the cheers that people had when it came to MagSafe coming back and they're like, oh, you free up a USB-C port, that's great too. So like, my answer, that's like just throwing another USB-C in there if you can, especially if you can support the amount of power demands that this laptop or any other computer is going to have. It's a strange, strange world we're in. It looks like if Microsoft is letting this go and Apple's going to do what Apple does, I'm not going to mess with that. But like this idea that the Surface Dock can be used for things that are not the Surface at all, and that actually is better for Microsoft in general. If they want to sell hardware, I don't think they're going to get like a halo effect from a Microsoft Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock. Like, oh, this is really great. I want to buy a Surface, but at least when you, you know, it works with the Surface no matter what. And now it works with stuff that's not the Surface at all. I think that could be a benefit to a lot of people out there who are looking for a solid, well-built device that likely will, like the company will exist tomorrow because a lot of these other USB-C docks I see sometimes, they're by companies you never heard about and I'm like, can they trust the one year warranty? Will they be here in three months? I don't know. The one thing with the lack of the SD cards like just thought of this, maybe this is a signal that Microsoft plans to be putting SD cards lots in all of their Surface devices for the foreseeable future. In that case, I'm okay with it not being on the dock. As long as I got it, that's all I care about. I want less dongle in that situation. Wishful thinking for less dongle. Well, one thing we don't have wishful thinking about is the status of live audio chat rooms, IS. Can you fill us in on some of the latest developments here? Yeah, so along with jobs, one of the other things that seems to be on every company's cut list is live audio experiences. Last year, MetaCut many of its audio products and now Spotify announced it will kill off its dedicated Spotify live app. I know all of you are really worried about that. There's millions of you out there use it, but it's probably not too surprising since it canceled much of its live audio content back in December. Spotify still says it sees a future for live fan creator interactions in the Spotify ecosystem. Yeah, so all of you Spotify live fans pour some out, but just remember as Spotify live dies title live lives. Yay. That streaming provider title has announced live as a way to let subscribers share live DJ sets with other subscribers. And this will be featured on your home screen with from your friends. So if anyone you're following is on there, as well as featured from curated live set list on their homepage, they're kind of providing a way to do that. Definitely a different take on this shared but still live audio experiences. You know, we're seeing this decline in the chat room kind of we saw kind of blow up during the pandemic IS. Does user generated music seem like it will have maybe more staying power on this front. I think the way title live would be working. I think it would make sense because people are tuning into essentially somebody's playlist or radio station is like hey look how great my music is. I want to share that with people so people can kind of go around that I never really understood the idea of things like clubhouse and then these audio forums it's like didn't we as a society all agree we don't want phone calls we don't want to talk. We want to see text and then if we want to join in on something we'll all like show up to like a theater or something and then someone will present so you can have a small club you go okay I'll pay attention to this but you got like anybody can come in anybody can talk you basically on the subway. So why on earth would you ever want this as a product. I mean, I guess there was a loneliness during the pandemic. I want to get a voice I need a voice and I don't always want to use a camera. I get that. But I think a lot of it is, you know, if somebody's presenting something you can have an audio community around them, like, I don't know anything ever at this point, or video people around them going oh yeah I'm going to join in because I'm actually ready to do this. And then they could always default back to the nice safety of an actual text based chat room. So that's what I think on that. Yeah, I do feel like, like, discord certainly stepped into in a lot of ways fill that gap where it's like oh this is a community I'm already in that has like a mission and a functionality I don't have to seek it out and whatever kind of it's not grafted into something I'm using like Twitter or Spotify, or I don't have to go to this whole new community and clubhouse or something like that I do feel that's part of it. Definitely the loneliness like it is, it is easy to forget where we were all mentally like in 2020 2021, depending on you know how long you've been at home and your situation there so I could I totally could can see the rise of this what's interesting though. There's a new idea what what title is doing here I mean certainly like turntable FM back in the day was this the very much this kind of idea it wasn't the most, you know, licensed idea wasn't tied into monetization the way of a music streaming provider is these days and Spotify itself tried something like this, they still offer it it's called group sessions and this came out same thing in the pandemic remote group sessions I should say they have kind of a two different in room and remote but unlike Spotify is a vision of this was very you're going to share it with a specific number of people so you would share like a URL with up to seven people that could all join and they contribute to the playlist title is very much a curator play so even if they're your friend, you're trusting them to do all of the curation within this right there's no there's really no interaction built into it at all other than. See how many people are kind of viewing your thing it's feels a little bit more I mean honestly it feels like it's it's more focused on creators right in the same way that you would do like a YouTube live or something like that and yeah you can have people watching that I do think it's weird that there is no community element to that. Another thing that's weird is this is all subscriber based right you have to be a title subscriber to be able to access this like if you click on the link that someone shares with you, you either have to send it for a free trial or you can't access it in any way. Does that seem like I'm thinking of this from a growth perspective like how does that help title grow when it's already a very niche player. That's a really dumb thing when you said that so how does it help them grow I'm going to try to answer that question as if I was title so here's how's here's I think this works. People are going to see these wonderful playlist done by their friends they really want to know what rich his title playlist is and it's so amazing you're like I'm going to sign up it's going to be so easy to sign up and then I will become a subscriber and then I will create a playlist which I will also share and then I will invite more people and then I'll invite two more people and so on and so on and so on like that gum commercial from like 1990, 1980, 1942, I don't know what it was it was a long time ago. But maybe that's it but like otherwise the idea that you can't just share and let people listen and go oh actually I like the experience I like the, the audio quality I like the ease of use of this product to give a differentiation factor. It seems a little bit short sighted but if they're just trying to grow. It's a way to go I just don't know if it's going to like spark. I don't believe this like the killer feature for title I think their main thing is audio quality not share ability. Yeah, well and, and also like artists, their whole artist equity kind of vibe to it. And that's really what feels like a limiting factor for this right is that they have to worry about like how they're going to, you know, pay for these tracks right it's like double FM was fly by night and we're, we're fudging all the details that we get taken down and stuff like that. I mean this is title title is very specific and saying, if you have five friends and they're all listening to us, that artist gets credit for five streams you know when you're when you're sending that out there so that is very much tied into this and I could see that being a benefit as well it's like, oh I'm a fan of this artist I'll join this stream and hey maybe they can, you know, like those kind of social dynamics. I feel like, but I'm just shocked that there's not some they can't figure out some way to do like display ads they have an ad supported tier right like they have that business model built in. You think they could find some way to have it help cast a wider net for their, for their service. It'll be the big edition of a new features like not for non subscribers in like three months like that's still around. We'll see how long this lasts. Yeah, wait for the quick hit of title live is also not alive anymore. But one thing that is alive is know a little more it's Tom's podcast to do deep dive into individual topics and it's coming back it lives this Thursday and it's better than ever. So if you have not yet checked out the show go get subscribed right now. The first episode in the relaunch is all a bar about RSS or a really simple subscription. It's rocky history and how it ended up being the underpinnings of podcasting. You may be familiar with that medium if you're listening to the show don't miss it. Subscribe by Thursday at know a little more.com. One of the big stories of the day Google is reversing its decision to put a file creation cap on Google Drive. Here's some background and might affect you about two months ago Google rolled out a 5 million file cap on all Google Drive users, including people paying for extra storage so not just you know your your free tier people but nobody had a heads up about it so understandably some users logged in to realize that they had millions of files over this new limit and we're not able to upload new files until they deleted enough to go under that limit and in some cases you know they were millions of files over that anyway personal users and businesses were both impacted by this change. So ours technically spoke to a Google spokesperson who said the file cap was not a bug and was actually quote a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system and quote the company says it rolled the limitation out to stop what it called misuse of Drive. Google also said it intends to explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all. Yeah, that's we got to have those great experiences are right as when it comes to all of our cloud storage. But the problem with limiting drive is that Google charges people for drive storage Google workspace business accounts go up to five terabytes of storage for normal accounts, and you might even have technically unlimited options available if you call Google and negotiate. Google one that's the consumer level option for more Google storage caps out at 30 terabytes and costs $150 a month. Drive also is in a storage bucket of its own since Google encourages developers to build the drive API into their apps and add cloud storage products, or add cloud storage into their products. You know, I as this is kind of been a story that's brewing I've you know I've seen reports of people kind of pointing this out and Google finally has kind of gone on the record to say, I think it's a remarkable say hey this is not a bug. I mean, if you logged in and I had to delete a couple of million files kind of would ruin your day right. I think so I mean it'd be a question why I have so many dang files in the first place but I mean the thing the biggest thing that annoyed people that they didn't say anything ahead of time and Google did say that they will from now on give users warning. Didn't say wouldn't do it again it just says okay let you know we might do something like this again. It's it's such a crazy idea. Like, here's this thing I probably would not have been annoyed by the idea that Google could limit the amount of files. I can put on there already have a terabyte limit or two terabytes whatever my overpaying for, but then to find out it can be five million files, like they don't give you a stat on there's no counter on that. All of a sudden I start thinking, do I have five million files. No I don't have five. It's impossible right now or is it possible I don't know I've got terabytes of junk that I've thrown to drive I've moved from different cloud storage options, and the consolidated all to drive. Are there millions of like little dot DS store but files that are garbage. Yeah, probably, because they would always be created on my max, because I was using like an TFS across class platform sharing will lead to a lot of garbage file creation, which I would then upload back. To my cloud store so this could be a problem for very weird people. But if you're also using drive for your business. That is a whole other can of worms. Yeah, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if we dug into the terms of Dropbox or box or iCloud or anything like that and see that there was some. There was some term in there that company X allows for the limit of blah blah blah if you go over a certain usage or you're deemed to be abusing the system I mean this. The sin here is not necessarily that they would institute a cap. It's that they just turned it on and didn't tell anybody ahead of time. And our second did a great job pointing this out in their coverage of this that Google workspace maintains like a calendar of policy change rollouts. They are very careful because they know they're competing with Microsoft was a pretty good track record when it comes to like rolling out these changes letting admins know. Hey, you know there's going to be new policy enforcement going on we're going to start you know blocking these macros by default or something like that you need to be prepared for that it's like a big deal in the world of productivity and if Google workspace and Google workspace wants to compete in that space. Generally they do a pretty good job of letting you know it seems baffling that Google would just turn this on unless they had evidence of you know they mentioned misuse or stability and safety. I don't know what I mean I obviously like someone could be hosting malware someone could be using it for you know some sort of horrible uploads or something like that and this is like targeted at a very specific subset of users. But we saw people complaining that you know the example that was going around was you know there was a business in veterinary care industry that all of a sudden couldn't access any of their files or couldn't upload new stuff because they were building everything on Google Drive. And all of a sudden they got cut off from that. That to me obviously is the biggest problem here. The one note to have though is that this was to individual like Google Drive accounts if you were sharing files with a bunch of other people. The shared files did not count against your you know your file cap or something like that because I know I was worried about that I have a lot of audio files weird audacity files that have 10,000 files each of them and stuff like that but a lot of those are shared so I wasn't. I'm not taking up someone's cap space and stuff like that. I mean, I think the story would have been much larger if people are titled isn't nobody should do this, you know puppies and kittens endangered by Google Drive. That's possible here and people love their puppies and kittens and everything else so the thing is that if that one particular case does sound pretty interesting but a lot of that like you were saying this particular use case scenario and you got to be ready for this stuff and that sounds really like I've learned my lesson the amount of times I've had oh I only have one drive and it's local. Yeah that's not a good idea. I have a cloud storage I got a backup I got a local backup I got another cloud storage thing. That's solid so that's probably good advice for anybody else out there who is, you know, depending on one company. Building a mission critical app and like a file sharing service like Drive I know they have API's I'm not saying that Google is in any way right of doing this but you something that's like s3 compliance that just just but has a service level agreement that you signed like do that please do that that's that's all I'm asking you to do. The other thing I'm asking you to do is pay attention to NASA because they just announced the Artemis to mission crew that's going to be going to the moon so let's have a little drum roll please I don't I don't have a drama actually so We have commander read Weissman Victor Glover and Christina hammock or coach excuse me representing the US along with the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen the four person crew will spend up to 21 days in an Orion capsule that will spend around 42 hours in high Earth orbit before touring the moon and then splashing down in the specific ocean specifically they'll be going around the mirror the moon so here's a who's who Christina hammock coach is known as a space is known in space land for already achieving the longest state in space by a female astronaut read Weissman is a Navy pilot who has also been a test pilot for the F 35 lightning to program. Victor Glover was part of the first operational Crew Dragon mission back in 2021 and Jeremy Hansen is a fighter pilot and one of four current Canadian astronauts so good on your Canada for representing Artemis to is set to launch in November 2024 and will represent the first time humans have flown to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 are you marking your calendar for Artemis to is I'm freaking psyched up there's the jokie part of me this was talked about the transformers or something but like this is exciting that there's actually like you know scientific money going into science and you know people going to space not because they just want to see the you know the part of the the curvature of the earth the actual research stuff it's not a bunch of like wacky billionaires being a bunch of can't say the words here but yeah it's nice to see actual human accomplishments that will probably benefit society and not you know I've been watching for all mankind on Apple on the Apple TV plus so it's all about moon stuff and and alt futures and stuff like that so I'm it's nice to see that there is in actual reality we're going back to the moon and I have little kids so I'm super psyched to be watching all these launches and and seeing those updates I've seen them through their eyes I think that was really really high quality video and imagery than we would probably have not gotten in a long time obviously got telescopes and things like that but like this is going to be something else. They're going to be using their phones I as they're going to be pushing out it's going to be like a space hardened like Samsung Galaxy s2 or something like that they have to use some real old it's going to be. What is that Apple satellite features like we're near or near them on a satellite is a count is like that. The one the one thing that makes me sad is that they won't bring the hassle blades back to the moon that makes me sad as a film photography guy but that's okay. But one thing that makes me happy is we got some stuff in the mail bag. Let's check it out. An episode 4486 this comes into us from Bernie. I was talking with Aaron Carson about the future of AI audio book narration. Bernie was thinking about what AI will do to certain industries and the field of audio books is one that I could see to have some potential jobs arise as AI is used more as the seasoned audio book narrators get older. They could strike a deal to punch up the AI when more emotion or context with more emotion or context and let the AI do the rest and discuss this becoming the norm. The upshot is that the library profile the library profile voice that will be licensed will continue to generate income long after the narrator gets older and loses the ability to perform audio books may not pay well but you'll receive a an income longer in the future. Yeah, I imagine the voice licensing game for AI will be will be quite strong going forward. There'll be that and then you'll have the person impersonators who can fill in when the season people are out and this is this is just a wild idea. I'm just thinking about like when we're talking about the moon stuff I'm like should I just put it in the chat GPT and like make funny point about transformers and moon. Like I could just on that. Yeah, we really just need the the is bots. Well, if you have any mother thoughts about audio books or about going back to the moon or Thunderbolt for docs that Microsoft is making to send us in at feedback at daily tech news show dot com we love to get your emails so please send them and the other thing we love is have an eyes act are on the show. I as thank you so much for joining us today where could people find where your great stuff online. Go to this old nerd.com there you'll see a show where I do occasionally maybe monthly sometimes weekly who knows what, but this time the latest episode is about installing a soundbar attached to a mountain television already. The show is all about having the most tech forward home in life as possible, and the projects are meant to be short. So check it out when you get a chance. Awesome. And thanks also to our brand new bosses, Chiara and Thomas who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you Chiara. Thank you, Thomas, you rule. 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