 Coming up on DTNS, Sony won't make as many PS5s as it wants. Amazon creates an invite-only luxury section of its store. And, oh yeah, Apple has new watches, iPads, and a new fitness subscription. There's a bunch of subscription bundles. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 15, 2020. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the place that my wife calls Mordor, I'm Patrick Vejo. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We also have the folks from SnoboS with us today. Nika Monford, how's it going? It's going good, Tom. Thanks for having us on. And Terrence Gaines, how are you? Hey, how's it going, everybody? We were just talking about which ones of us spent money on Apple products already and a lot of other stuff on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that show, become a member at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Walmart Plus is live, offering unlimited free delivery for many items, mobile scan, and go check out gas discounts and more. Walmart Plus costs $12.95 per month, U.S. dollars, or $98 per year. ViacomCBS announced that it will change the name of its CBS All Access streaming service to Paramount Plus in early 2021. ViacomCBS also announced new original programming coming to the service, including series on the making of the movie, The Godfather, and a spy show from Yellowstone's Taylor Sheridan. Google announced Google Meet hardware for conference rooms called Series 1. It includes cameras, a speaker, a computer unit with some optional additional accessories like touch screens and remotes. The system can automatically frame people while they're talking and filter out background noise and enhanced voices. Series 1 runs Chrome OS on the Edge, Tensora processing units. There are three suites of hardware based on room size from $26.99, that's $2,699, up to $3,999 available for pre-order soon. Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang wrote a 6,600-word memo to coworkers about Facebook's response to misinformation campaigns. According to BuzzFeed News, the memo details misinformation campaigns by governments in Honduras, Azerbaijan, India, Bolivia, and more. Zhang regrets not prioritizing such situations and alleged that Facebook executives are motivated by public backlash and focused on the US and the West. Zhang was fired by Facebook this month, turned down severance pay though, so she would be free to send this memo. Adobe Illustrator for iPad was announced in November and is now up for pre-order shipping October 21st. This version of Illustrator works with Apple Pencil and is available to creative cloud members at no additional cost if their plan includes Illustrator. HP decided to announce a product on Apple Day, debuted its Omen Vector Wireless Mouse with USB-C charging. HP claims it can get an hour of battery life in 30 seconds of charging and a whole day of battery life in five minutes of charging. If you go the whole 90 minutes of charging, it charges for use of up to 180 hours. The Omen Vector Wireless Mouse is $99.99 available now in the US. Speaking of announcements, Arlo announced a wire-free version of its video doorbell with rechargeable batteries like the wired version. It supports HDR and night vision with an 18-degree field of view. The Arlo Smart Service for Object and People Detection costs $2.99 per month after a free trial. The Arlo Essential Wire-Free Video Doorbell is available for pre-order at $199.99 shipping this holiday season. Twitter launched a US election tab in its Explore section Tuesday. Twitter will use it to show a curated selection of English and Spanish language election news, debate, live streams, government election resources, and candidate information. It will also run public service announcements with information on voting. IBM published its roadmap for its quantum computer, saying it expects to build a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits with 19 to 50 logical qubits by the end of 2023. IBM's current model has 65 qubits with plans to launch a 127 qubit machine next year and a 433 qubit machine in 2022. This summer, Microsoft reeled in its underwater data center off Scotland's Orkney Islands after a two-year experimental deployment as part of Project Natic. The shipping container-sized data center had 864 servers sitting at a depth of 117 feet. Microsoft said that the underwater data center was eight times more reliable than land-based centers, in part because dry nitrogen air underwater inside the container was less corrosive than oxygen. The European Court of Justice ruled that excluding data consumption from a customer's data cap as a special offer, sometimes called zero-rating, violates EU rules on net neutrality. Several European carriers offer packages that exempt certain apps like Facebook or Twitter from counting against data caps, and a case against Hungary's telenoor for such practices had been referred to the ECG. And scientists at Australia's Monash University have produced a device that combines camera sensors and implanted microelectrodes to restore vision to blind people. The system works in preclinical trials on sheep, and the first human clinical trial is set to take place in Melbourne. Video is interpreted by a vision processor and then transmitted wirelessly to a set of tiles implanted in the brain bypassing the optic nerve. The tiles then convert the images to neural impulses. So this is a real working thing that if it works in human trials, that's going to be amazing. All right, let's talk a little more about Amazon launching luxury stores for high-end brands to present products separate from the rest of Amazon and separate in more than one way. Oscar de la Renta is the first official partner, but they say they'll have more. Luxury store partners will have more control over their inventory, their selection and pricing than normal Amazon vendors do. They'll also get some special tools to show off items like a 360-degree view, and only select Amazon Prime members will be invited to access the store to give it that exclusive feel, although you can request an invitation. I don't think they're trying to keep people out, but they're trying to balance that, like, exclusivity feel. I don't know. What do y'all think of this? By select Prime members, I think they mean we'll select all of them. That's definitely a marketing thing, I think. But I mean, Amazon feels a little bit like the place where you go for cheap, good deals, not, you know, exclusively, but I don't think they could launch with significant partners in that way and have that luxury feel without doing a little bit more, something a little bit different, and that might be it. Yeah, because I was going to say I don't do a lot of shopping on Amazon. It's like I'll do my shopping elsewhere, and then I'll say, well, I'll just go to Amazon and buy it. But this way, you can kind of get that shopping feel with all the extra features. So I'm assuming this is a play on staying on the website longer. If there's added luxurious shopping experience versus just throwing a bunch of stuff in my cart and hitting the three months, subscribe and keep it moving. I think it's more on the branding side. I think anytime you say something is exclusive or luxury, people want to get in on it, and they don't want to miss out, so they want to be a part of it. Honestly, I just think it's a marketing scheme to get people talking and get people interested. Yeah, it's targeting. Go ahead, Patrick. Oh, just wanted to mention it's targeting a different, you know, trying to target a different market and its growth. Amazon always needs to get new types of products and new types of customers or get existing customers to buy more. So maybe that's also a way of trying to e-count that little bit of growth they have left, given that they essentially own the world already. Yeah, I think it's funny. Every so often, I'll search on Amazon for something, you know, that's like considered a luxury brand, like, I don't know, some Chanel lipstick or something, and it's there. And I go, oh, wow, it's there. I just wouldn't thought of Amazon as the place to get this. If there was a kind of luxury brand platform on the entire platform, I mean, it doesn't really matter, because I can buy it either way, but I can see where being able to cater to folks who are looking for something that's a little bit higher end on Amazon itself, but it not look like Amazon, it's always like, you know, we're undercutting everybody else kind of thing. Then, you know, it's kind of a win-win. Yeah, Oscar de la Renta doesn't want to show up next to the sardines in your shopping list. Exactly. Bloomberg sources say that Sony has reduced expectations for PlayStation 5 manufacturing by 4 million units to 11 million units by the end of March. They say the reduction is due to manufacturing problems, including yields as low as 50% from the AMD system on a chip. Sony had planned on a far fewer before lockdown number boosted demand for gaming gear. Sony's PS5 price and release date are expected to be announced on Wednesday. That's tomorrow. That is significant. I mean, the reduction in production numbers is significant. The yield seems extremely low for me. It's not unexpected for completely new CPUs to have low yield, but 50%. That has to improve quickly for them to be able to get that thing out the door a little bit more. It seems, you know, we were thinking there are going to be shortages initially, and then they were producing more. Now we're back to shortages, so putting those pre-orders as soon as you can. So is that the trick? Is that a ploy? Excuse my conspiracy theory here. Is that a trick for people to gain? You know, like we mentioned before, you got iPhones coming out. You got Xbox coming out. We got the holiday shopping season. We got coronavirus. We've got all this stuff packed in. So all these different Amazon, Samsung now, we got all these different ways. Are they trying to figure out how they can pick at us to get us to jump in early versus waiting and wait until, you know, things start to die down? There's some Sony supply chain manager right now going, I wish it was a trick. I wish. 50% yield is not what I wanted to see. I mean, that doesn't mean they can't take advantage of it that way, right? To kind of, you know, tweak the demand somehow like better order fast because we don't have that many of them. Yeah, I mean, all of the analysts that I've been hearing from and I follow quite a few and some of them are my friends, they're all saying that no matter how many they produce, they're going to sell out. They're going to sell everything they have given the current climate and the boost that gaming has seen and the excitement of people and the price that Microsoft is forcing and all of those things. I would be very, very surprised. It might be inaccurate reporting. I guess that's possible. But I would be very surprised if that was, you know, a ploy. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, don't forget to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Hey, I don't know if you all saw, but there was an Apple announcement today. A few of them actually. Let's start with the watches. Apple Watch Series 6 is out. It will be available. It's actually available for order right now. Shipping starting Friday, but don't expect if you haven't ordered one yet to get your shipping date to be Friday because they're already starting to push out. It's available starting at $399 for the GPS only version, $499 for the cellular in gray, silver, gold or blue aluminum. Also stainless steel model in graphite or yellow gold and the high-end addition model in natural or black titanium. A few other models out there as well. The big deal on it is it's got the S6 chip, which is a new advanced chip for the watch based on the A13 optimized for Apple Watch. They're calling it Apple Silicon, 20% faster than the older watch and a blood oxygen measurement feature. So 15 seconds to measure your blood oxygen, periodic background readings. There's some other stuff like two and a half times brighter always on display so that it's easier to see even when you're not raising your wrist. A bunch of new watch faces, a new solo loop that's stretchable so you don't have to connect it. You just pull it on over ultra wide band and this family setup where if you want to get your child to watch but not a phone, they can have their own phone number and you can put parental controls on it, stuff like that. Terrence, let's start with you because you and I are the ones who already ordered this. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I'm starting to get to the mode where I didn't get them every other year versus every single year so I bumped up to the ceramic version. Like I mentioned Tom, I was interested in the solo loop but they had this whole watch fitting guide and I'm one of those people that's like, I need to go in here and get this now. So it's like I skipped that option and just got the sport loop. But I'm definitely interested to see how the solo loop works because it's unlike some of the traditional Apple Watch bands because there are different sizes versus just adjusting the lock or adjusting the strap to fit your wrist. So I'd be interested to see how that all works as far as the order process is concerned. Nika, did we peer pressure you into buying one yet? Not yet. I've been scrolling on the website looking around. I'm not completely sold on it but I'm leaning but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I'm still looking at the colors. I'm coming off of a series three here so I feel like this is a big upgrade for me because I'm going to get a lot of that stuff that was in the series four and five that I missed out on. But if you're on a series five. I'm on four. If someone is on a four maybe maybe an upgrade but it's a you're a little more on the fence right because you're farther off if you have a series five and you don't need if you're not worried about your blood oxygen level. I'm not sure you need to upgrade. The only other thing I could see about the six is the chip that gives you the next generation digital car keys. But again, if you're on if you're on a series three, I'm not assuming you may not have a vehicle that gives you the option to do digital car keys. So it's kind of like yeah, I'm still I'm still not missing anything by upgrading. No, my 2014 Honda Civic does not have that you are correct. Only the BMW had the car. I think that's right so far. Yeah, that's the only one that's been announced anyway. We also got the Apple Watch SE, which is essentially the same thing as the five with fewer features. So no always on display no electric cardiogram or blood oxygen monitor. But it does have the always on altimeter accelerometer heart rate compass gyroscope motion sensors $279 for that one or $12 a month over 24 months and they're keeping the series three available as the baseline option for $199. Patrick, what do you think of these watches? The series three feels like the reason for you to feel like you're getting the middle model and not the cheaper one when you get to watch SE. But it's definitely interesting. It doesn't have the big health tracker things on the SE. And I think it's going to be, you know, the way Apple is segmenting all of their product lines is really fascinating because the watch was the last one that didn't have a cheaper model. But now they have the SE things. It's almost like we need an iPad SE and they have really. I don't want to say affordable because obviously, you know, it's it's snobs all around when we talk about Apple as Terence and Nika know. Obviously, but I think this is a very mid range category of products that they're diving into very, very much and it's getting Apple for a cheaper price and still high quality product. Now, of course, if you want the best thing, you still have to, you know, pull out a little bit more money from that wallet, obviously. But I think it's a very interesting strategy and it's working. All right, let's talk about subscriptions. Apple Fitness Plus is a new service from Apple. We know Apple is moving towards wanting to make money off of subscriptions off of services. Apple Fitness Plus is kind of a shot at Peloton saying we've got instructors. We've got workouts like yoga, cycling, dance, treadmill, strength, core, rowing, hit, mindful, cool down even. And all you need are your Apple Watch and your phone or your tablet or your Apple TV. They have an algorithm that'll give you workout recommendations. So you'll see this either in a tab in your activity app or in the fitness app that you'll be able to get for the iPad and Apple TV. They promise that all your data is going to be stored on your device, nothing associated with your Apple ID. $10 a month or $80 a year just for that. They'll be doing a three month free trial if you get a new Apple Watch. But the big announcement was Apple One, which is three bundles, even though it's called Apple One. The main bundle is for an individual. You get iCloud, 50 gigabytes, Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade for $15 a month. The family plan is $20 a month. You get, again, Music TV Arcade and iCloud 200 gigabytes of storage. Or you can go Premiere in some countries. That gives you all of that Plus News Plus and the new Fitness Plus and two terabytes of storage for $30 a month. All of that's coming this fall. That was the one thing that confused me is like, well, if you're announcing these, why aren't you making them available? They're subscriptions. What they hear right now makes me wonder if they want to have them available at the same time as the new iPhones. Well, I think a lot of the fitness stuff probably they've been working on it and need to make it solid. I have to say of this entire announcement, the Fitness Plus stuff got me the most excited because I just love working out in my garage. That's what I do anyway. Like I put on my VR headset and I work out all the time. Happens. But you know, and like the Peloton or other subscription based, you know, workout services and there are some, but Peloton is probably the most well known. They are awesome, but they're expensive. You know, they were, you know, this is like a luxury thing for Apple to say, you can use any, you know, just like, I don't know. But some old, some old, some, some old bike and, you know, then you can get the service for 999 is like, oh, interesting. Yeah. You know, especially since Peloton just released the, I think what are they calling the bike plus, which is their lower tier version of their current bike. So I really, I really do think it is Apple's kind of, you know, hey, we got something over here. That's just as good and quite a bit cheaper. Right. And you don't have to use, you can use any equipment, right? So most of the non equipment workouts, like the hidden, the cool down and the, the strength, you know, they mentioned all you need is dumbbells. You know, but if you do, for instance, what I was interested in Apple Fitness Plus, because I have a rowing machine, you know, some of the other rowing machines are super expensive, but the features for like the classes are not there. The features for the, you know, tracking your distance and tracking all the other things that you would normally want to track on a rowing machine is not there with the services. Well, here comes Apple. They've got all of that. I can use any bike. It's like a win-win or I can use any machine. It's a win-win. You know, who else thinks this is interesting? All of the companies and developers that have fitness apps on the Apple ecosystem, where anti competitive and monopoly issues are very much alive. I think this is a bold move by Apple. Spotify already issued a protest about the bundling just because of the music. Yeah. I can't imagine how the fitness people also feel. I really love how they're kind of tying in fitness and music, though. I barely have time to listen to music nowadays. So I'm like, all right, I want to, I want to do fitness because I want to listen to music. So that's going to be my motivation. So I'm going to pay for Apple music. And Peloton is having these disputes with music licensing so Apple can kind of throw a little shade there too and say, we don't have any problems with that over here because we got Apple music and it's all part of the same bundle. In fact, I think the premier $30 a month is still cheaper than a Peloton subscription. Yes, it is. I think the Peloton subscription with no equipment is like 40 bucks. Yeah. I do want to mention we don't have Peloton, I don't think in France or Europe. And we're not getting Apple fitness plus thing either. At least not until the end of the year, maybe later. And we don't have Apple news either. So I'm not going to work out after all. But you do get, but you do get the playlist from the workouts you can access on Apple music. And listen to our workouts, you know, after we were like, this was really great. Listen, I do think the pricing here is dead center. If you, if you already have like two of these, it makes sense to get it. And if you, if you already want three of them like iCloud, don't forget iCloud. In fact, iCloud may be the most compelling, even though it's the most boring part of this, it does make sense. If you only use one of these, obviously not a big deal. Maybe on two, you're on the fence. Let's talk about the iPads. The iPad Air is now the best iPad out there. 10.9 inch liquid retina display, 2360 by 1640. Fully laminated true tone anti-reflective, all of that. But they moved the touch ID into the top button with the sapphire crystal lens. They've got the newest chip they make, the A14 bionic on a five nanometer process. In fact, the announcement of the iPad Air was more an announcement of the A14 chip, the A14 bionic chip than it was an announcement of an iPad Air. Six core design, too high and for low, 40% faster than the previous iPad Air. Four core GPU that's 30% faster graphics than the previous chip. Two times faster graphics than a comparable laptop, which was an HP. They didn't call it out by name, but they put an HP laptop up there. 16 core neural engine, two times faster machine language than previous versions. Machine language accelerators that are 10 times faster than the previous Air. Also, they made it USB-C, no more lightning on the iPad Air. 20 watt charging, 5 gigabit per second data transfers. Decent camera, 7 megapixel front, 12 megapixel on the rear. Supports 4K video with improved stabilization. So it's even better than the iPad Pro camera at this point. Stereo audio in landscape mode. Wi-Fi 6 supports the new Apple Pencil and the Magic Keyboard, as well as the Fully O keyboards available in silver, space gray, rose gold, green and sky blue for $599 base. Available next month. There's also going to be some carrier models with LTE built-in. No 5G on these. And just to make sure we mention it, the iPad 8th generation is the newest entry-level iPad. It's just a better chip than the 7th gen. A12 Bionic 6 core chip. Works with the full-size smart keyboard and Logitech keyboards. Apple Pencil original, not the new one. Is it $329 or $299 for education? That one also available for order today, shipping Friday. So the iPad Air knocked till next month. The iPad 8th gen available now. But really, I mean, this is all about the iPad Air, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I'm pretty impressed with the iPad Air. Just the A14 chip alone, it seems pretty powerful. It's definitely looking like a superb device. And it even has the look and feel of the iPad Pro. So it's definitely a great device from what it seems like. So the iPad Pro is still more expensive than the iPad Air. Right. I guess it has a camera module that is more capable on the back. The LiDAR. Yeah. Exactly. That seems like a weird product positioning. If the only thing it has is that maybe a couple of other things. But that was weird. The only things I was able to find that differentiate the iPad Air versus the iPad Pro was the 120 Hertz refresh rate on this screen display, face ID, and the LiDAR camera. Other than that, the iPad Air is equal, if not better, with a better stabilization on the camera with the price and with the new chip. So it leads me to believe they got to be around the corner, if not this year, early next year, updating the iPad Pro. Or is that too soon? Well, they just updated it in March. They're usually on a year schedule. So I'd be surprised if they updated it before March. But also it feels weird to have the iPad Pro sitting there next to the iPad Air right now. Right. Yeah. So many of the folks that were following the announcement as we were, so much of it was, what is going on with the iPad line? The iPad Air is now better than the iPad Pro. Why didn't you just redo the iPad Pro? I mean, I have to believe that Apple is phasing out the iPad Pro and the Air is going to become the iPad. Because I don't really understand what they're doing otherwise. It is a little confusing. All right, let's wrap this up with the last announcement that iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and TVOS 14 all out tomorrow. We're recording this on Tuesday, so all out on Wednesday. Not MacOS, which makes me think they're saving that for a laptop announcement in October when we expect we'll get iPhone announcements as well. You can start updating on Wednesday. Go get them. Yeah. So that even the people who would have liked to buy iPhones but can't, they still get something new, so yay. Yeah, and it's pretty cool. I have the public betas on my iPhone and my iPad, and it's a nice upgrade. Definitely, definitely with the widgets is the main thing you want to play around with. Looking forward to see what third party developers do with the widgets because right now it's all Apple stuff. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You submit stories and vote on others every day, and we appreciate you for it. Keep it up, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, real quickly, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. Mike and Smokey San Francisco said, I have a paranoid thought. When the team was expressing concerns about the body compass radar data, I was surprised that nobody discussed the recognition identification potential of the technology, although I'm sure Tom considered it because it's common knowledge that he considers all ramifications of every story. Isn't that nice for you? Mike says, if the device also uses radio waves to detect your breathing and body position, couldn't it also recognize your unique skeletal structure? Couldn't the same technology be deployed in a public location similar to cameras, but even less obtrusive? Mike, I'm not going to say you don't look good in your tinfoil hat, but it's a big leap to go from radio waves that can detect your breathing to skeletal structure. I'm not saying maybe someday, but from what I know, that would be a big leap for this technology, so you don't have to worry about that quite yet. We also got an email from Edge, who just wanted to take a moment to say thanks for all the hard work we do. Thank you, Edge. Edge wrote, I've been a listener since the TNT days and a patron for two to three years now. I really believe in what you all do, so this year I told my wife, all I wanted for our 10-year anniversary is a DTNS mug. He says, I'm a simple guy, and she came through. Unfortunately, my anniversary is 10 days away and I discovered it accidentally, but she was cool enough to let me have it anyway. So I figured I'd share a picture of it as well. Thanks again. Take care and be safe. Edge, looking good with that DTNS mug and a happy anniversary to you and yours. That's amazing. Indeed, Edge. And thanks for writing in. And yeah, looking good. You know, enjoy the mug. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Paul Rees, Martin James, and Degrassia A. Daniels. Also, thanks to Patrick Beja. He's our Tuesday person. Patrick, what's been going on with you since we saw you last? Thank you for the factual endorsement. I have it here. I am at notpattering.com and you can find everything I do there. It's a brand new website that looks pretty snazzy. It definitely does. Definitely does. Well, glad to see you back and see you next week. Also, thanks to Nika Monford and Terence Gaines, the Snob OS podcast folks. It's so fun to have you on the show and let folks know how they can keep up with your work. Oh, yeah, most definitely. You can catch us on the web at snoboscast.com. You can catch our weekly podcast. We're on Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify at Snob OS. We're getting there. We're getting better. We're on YouTube. We're doing video now. So you can find us on YouTube at snoboscast. Another network just on social Instagram, Facebook and Instagram all at snoboscast. We appreciate the support from the DTNS crew. Definitely appreciate it. Definitely. Yeah, you got to go become a patron. So you get that little alert tells you when they're going live. You can watch live. Yes. Yes. We appreciate it. Patron.com. 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