Tech News Weekly 349 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Dan Moren is here subbing in for Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. We start the show by talking about Apple and Patreon. Apple wants Patreon to switch its billing system, which means that creators could end up footing the bill for Apple's cut. Then KOSA and COPPA are in the news. We talk about what's next for Congress's child safety legislation. Afterwards, jason Howell stops by. Jason Howell of Techsploder to tell us all about what was announced at the Made by Google event. Jason was there in person, so we get to hear his first impressions of these new devices and the software that comes as part of them. Stay tuned for a wonderful episode of Tech News Weekly.

0:00:51 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:59 - Mikah Sargent
This is Tech News Weekly with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent, episode 349, recorded Thursday, august 15th 2024. First impressions of Google's Pixel 9. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am Mikah Sargent, one of your hosts, and this week, if you've all been following along, you would expect that the person on the other end of the line would be Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. Due to some unforeseen travel issues, Jennifer will not be joining us this week. We wish her well and wish her safe travels, but in her place is the wonderful, the one, the only, the super cool. It's Dan Moren. Welcome back to the show, dan.

0:01:51 - Dan Moren
It's good to be here, Mikah. I too was traveling this week, but I traveled so I could be here. That's my level of dedication.

0:01:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, in fact, he left his vacation early to be here. No, we're making it up, but it is good to have you here and I appreciate you for stepping in. As folks are probably getting used to by now, this is the show where we typically talk about some stories of the week. We kick off the show by sharing our stories of the week and chatting about them, and it is typical this week in that sense in that we will both be sharing stories of the week. So to kick things off, dan, I hope you could give us an introduction to your story so we can chat about it.

0:02:37 - Dan Moren
So if you're familiar at all with the way that Apple does business on its platforms, notably the App Store, you probably know that the way that it operates is to allow developers to sell apps, but Apple takes a cut of any proceeds generated on the platform. Now, it's more complicated than that, obviously, but that's the big chunk of it. If you make an app and you sell it for a dollar, apple takes 30 cents off that dollar. This has also been expanded to include things like in-app purchase and subscriptions, while Apple has pushed more and more of developers to using those. This week, what happened is we found out that Patreon, which has been operating on the App Store for quite some time on iOS, will also be required to hand over that 30%. Now, why Patreon wasn't doing this before, it's kind of unclear. Technically, they do sell subscriptions and memberships through the app, so it seems like they should be required to hand over that 30% like everybody else. But they seem to have been operating in a sort of gray area where maybe either Apple didn't ask them for that money or they didn't volunteer that money. Sure, seems like it's probably the former, since you think Apple would want the money if they could get it. This obviously has led to some consternation, because, in order to get that 30%, patreon is essentially saying that the creators who are using their service to basically have a stable of subscribers and provide them with sort of bonus content or creations for their subscription fees, will need to pass that cost on to their own subscribers, which is very challenging, right? If you're an independent creator and you are making art or you're making books or podcasts or videos or what have you, all of a sudden you have to tell people essentially that if they are going through iOS, they may have to pay more than if, they, say, went directly to the Patreon website. This is even more challenging because Apple has long enforced a restriction that does not allow apps to push people towards their website. So, for example, saying, hey, you can subscribe here and it'll cost you this much, but if you go to our website, you can pay less. Apple doesn't want you to do that, because then they don't get their sweet sweet cut of that money.

Of course, because we're talking about mostly pretty independent creators, many of whom don't tend to generate a lot of revenue, this policy has come out feeling very hostile towards those independent creators, which is troubling, especially for Apple, which is a company, that for Apple, which is a company that, of course, likes to put forth this image that it is a supporter and an enabler for people who are involved in creative endeavors. They've already run afoul of that in recent months. Back, if you remember, there was earlier this year that iPad ad with the hydraulic press squishing everything. That didn't go over particularly well, with a lot of creators which saw that as sort of being like hey, why create anything when you can just smush it into an iPad and we don't really value any of these things that you're doing. So this is a bit of a struggle for Apple. It's unclear whether or not any changes might be forthcoming, but I certainly personally would not bet on it. Apple is pretty good at sticking to its guns when it comes to making money, but it also doesn't feel like it's a particularly good PR. Look for them and, as I said in the past, they've had a lot of challenges with this and it's really hard to square that with the image they like to put out there, and image is a big part of what Apple's about. I think what makes this extra challenging is that iOS is so prevalent, especially when you combine it with Android. Basically they account for the entire smartphone market that independent creators, developers, all these people.

You can't not exist on iOS. It's basically a non-starter. You have to be there in some form or another. And that makes it feel kind of monopolistic, because if the alternative is, well, we'll just put everybody on the web. Instead, a lot of people won't get there because they won't go to your website. It's just, if you're not in the App Store, it really is hard to necessarily get to customers. So in that way, it does feel a bit like a penalty being enforced on these people. It's like, well, you have to be here and you have to pay that 30%, and so in order to do that, you kind of get boxed in.

So as part of this, patreon is going to make some changes to its app. For one thing, it's going to move everybody to the iOS in-app purchase system. For another, it's switching a lot of creators over to subscription billing, which is also a challenge, because not all creators on Patreon use a subscription billing method. There's different ways on Patreon of monetizing your content. Sometimes it could be per piece. For example, if you put out a piece of artwork or a podcast or a video show, it might be on a per episode basis, for example, that If you put out a piece of artwork or a podcast or a video show, it might be on a per episode basis, for example, that you're charging people as opposed to just charging them a flat fee every month, but Apple's in-app purchase system doesn't really support that. So that is a challenge as well for a lot of these people, I think.

In a larger environment, obviously, we've seen a bunch with Apple being accused of various business practices. Even recently, where they were Basically the Department of Justice has levied an antitrust suit against them though, it should be noted, not really with anything to do with any of this. Right which is even weirder right, they're getting accused of SMS, not supporting other apps using SMS, or something like that, and everyone's like why are you looking at this? Look at this stuff? Clearly there are things happening here and obviously they've got a big challenge over in the European Union as well, where they've been deemed a gatekeeper and have had to make a lot of changes to their app store policy and business rules in order to comply with the digital markets app over there.

So I think what we're seeing sort of from like a zoom out macrocosm level is because the iOS is so woven through the fabric of all of our lives. It is becoming an increasing target and it's also becoming, as I said, kind of a necessity. So you do start running afoul of these types of things, whether it be antitrust or challenges with third parties and creators, because you kind of do control this massive platform that is just an enormous part of everybody's life. So I don't know how this is going to shake out. Like I said, I think Apple tends to be pretty good about getting its money, but I do think that this is sort of another drop in the bucket that is getting people more and more frustrated with the App Store business model, and it's not hard to imagine that you're going to see more vocal complaining about this as it goes forward, and maybe that might tip Apple eventually into making some changes. We're going to have to wait and see.

0:09:21 - Mikah Sargent
This is upsetting, because there's a part of me that feels like Apple, because I was thinking about this and how there's now this focus, meanwhile and forgive me if you mentioned it in that Spotify is apparently about to not have to, is about to be able to direct users from its app In the EU. Yeah, in the EU. That's true. That's fair, that's a good point.

0:09:50 - Dan Moren
Where they sued them too and had a whole complaint and everything. So that was like a court case. But this is. The US has not proved as regulatory.

0:10:00 - Mikah Sargent
And it feels a little bit like Apple preparing for a waterfall by. Stick with me here grabbing little kid floaties, those little ones that you put on your arms piece by piece by piece, and it's like that's probably not going to keep you afloat in comparison to the money that you were making from all of these other companies to pick on what boils down to the little guy. But then there's this. This is the problem that I have with it. At the same time, there's another aspect of this, which is that capitalism is at play and Patreon is making the choice to make its creators foot the bill.

It could very well say that this is us to foot the bill and that's frustrating, but there's so much, you know, little politics at play here too. If you make the creator foot the bill, all of the creators get upset. We talk about it on shows. It maybe pushes Apple to make a change, but at the same time, all of the creators are going to be hurting from this, and I think that on Patreon's part, that's a little bit of a. You know, they're letting down their own creators by not choosing to be the shield and the sort of haven in which creators can exist and thrive. So I think both of the big companies involved in this have work to do in being better and yeah, I'm kind of disappointed in both.

0:11:43 - Dan Moren
I agree with you.

I think what's also interesting about that sort of is the you mentioned.

We live in a capitalistic society, for better and for worse, and I found myself thinking like what if Apple just decided to change all the rules and be like look, if you're not generating more than $10 million or $20 million, right, really targeting sort of those big companies like your Netflix's and your Spotify's Maybe they just make it free or cut it down to the payment processing percentage, right, like, oh, it's 3%, we handle it through our payment processing and that's it.

But I also know in my head I've spent years, decades, covering Apple quarterly financial calls and you know that in that case, all the analysts would be going like well, you sell all these services, why aren't you taking your percentage? Or why did you give up all this money that you were bringing in as a company? You can't be like, yeah, we just don't want that money. Even though they have so much money, our society does not allow them to simply forego those. I mean, you could make the argument that there is a benefit, an intangible benefit, in reputation and all of that, but weighed against the bottom of a balance sheet, it doesn't seem to feel like it really matters, and that's from the perspective of many creators and consumers. I think that is very frustrating.

0:12:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I agree, and I'm wondering why there's not a. We talked a little bit about this on clockwise um shout out to that podcast. Uh, that there's not more of a. Just, I think that Apple would have benefited from making a super clear set of guidelines when it comes to this early on, so that there's no gray area here.

I understand that there's always going to be some places where things slip through the cracks, but people the problem is, you can count on humans to exist in gray areas and then build businesses in gray areas and then thrive on gray areas, and then, when those gray areas have to become black or white, then you know things happen. It's sort of the elephant trail of business. An elephant trail being when somebody designs a path from point A to point B Right yeah, desire path, sort of yeah, and then you make your own path that's just easier to get from point A to point B. That's, yeah, desire path, sort of yeah, and then you make your own path that's just easier to get from point A to point B. That's the elephant trail.

So, yeah, I think that if Apple had maybe been just straight up about this in the first place, then maybe we wouldn't be in this issue now, but I don't know. I'm curious to see how this plays out, but this seems. I'd like to hear from you, in terms of someone who pays attention to all of this regularly. I'd like to hear how you've seen the vast majority of people reacting. This seems like one decision that Apple's made that no one sees as a good thing Like there's no, I mean.

0:14:48 - Dan Moren
I think Apple does Apple's just fine with it right.

No, I mean, I think you're right, like I think, in general, the reaction to this, both in terms of online communities and, obviously, patreon and its creators, has been overwhelmingly negative. Nobody wants to charge more. If they, if they wanted to charge more for their you know the Patreon Nobody wants to charge more. If they wanted to charge more for their, you know the Patreon creators want to charge more they would be charging more. They have picked a price point right For which they feel like, okay, this is good, this is what people subscribe for, this is what I feel is a good, you know rate for me to be charging. These are small business people, essentially, and they're making those determinations and then to suddenly have to be told that you have to rejigger your entire price structure because of something that a giant corporation that makes a ton of money does feels really gross. I mean, a lot of these people are, even if it's not the way they make their living. You can go and find lists, sort of essentially, of how much people are making on patreon, and the vast majority of people on patreon are not making that much money. They're maybe making tens, twenties, hundreds of dollars a month or something. You know that's, that's great if you're an artist, but it's not like you're gonna live on that money, and so to to suddenly say, all right, well, either you have to eat that 30%, right, or you have to raise your prices. Those are both really bad, because you raise those prices and maybe you lose subscribers, right, maybe people decide not to come along or decide they don't want to give you that money, and you've again.

If you've picked a price point that you felt like was a good place for you to offer your creations, it's tough to be told that that's no longer the case.

And it's not a small percentage either, right? If this were a percent or two, you'd be like it's frustrating, but like, okay, maybe I can deal with that. 30% is a lot, that's a lot, and I think, aside from Apple, there are very few people out there right now who think a 30% cut is reasonable for the services that Apple is providing. But the alternative is not there, because you can't even say just go to Android. I mean, most of these companies are on Android already, right? They are all doing business there because they got to be in both those places. So the really only alternative is stop distributing on iOS and go to the web and if enough people did that, it might make a dent. But again, if you're not there, the chances are you may be losing out on business. So I think it's a very challenging position for all these creators and it feels gross from Apple to just be like let's start extorting these people.

0:17:21 - Mikah Sargent
Essentially, yeah, I agree. Well obviously have be having to keep an eye on how this all plays out, if, uh, apple is going to make some changes or if it's going to stick with this. It's not often that the company rolls things back, but they have from time to time made some some changes, so we'll see what takes place there.

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All righty folks. For the second story of the week, this one's mine. I want to talk about where things stand when it comes to KOSA, k-o-s-a and I can't remember if people are pronouncing it COPA or COPPA, but C-O-P-P-A. So KOSA is the Kids Online Safety Act and COPPA. C-o-p-p-a is the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act, and these two bills that have made their way through legislation I should say it's kind of like a package because they have multiple kind of breakdown parts that all come together to, you know, make the law and in each of these they have been merged into one big package called COSPA or COSPA. It is the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act.

Now this bill did pass in the Senate. It's important to understand that. When was it? It was on July 30th. It passed KOSA and COPPA, which is COPPA 2.0. The first one came out in 1998 and it passed 91 to three, so incredibly bipartisan. It is kind of wild, apparently in in the Senate to have passed so well and it is making its way into the House of Representatives Now and it is making its way into the House of Representatives Now.

Interestingly, the kind of breakdown of these two bills include again KOSA, which is the Kids Online Safety Act, and that says that here's the deal. There's a duty of care that tech platforms have to make sure that people are that small. Children are not even small. I'll get into that in a moment. Children are protected online and I want to talk more about KOSA, but I think that it's easier, now that I think about it, to talk about COPPA first, c-o-p-p-a, because the first version of COPPA passed in 1998. And basically it made it so that when kids signed up for a service they had to either be over the age of 13, or if they were under the age of 13, then they had to get their parents' consent to be on the site. Now, of course, many of us just put our age above 13 by putting in a different birth date so we were able to access the sites. But that was one part, kind of the major part, of COPPA.

Coppa 2.0 does even more because it bumps the age up to 17. Does even more because it bumps the age up to 17. So now you have to be 17 to join a service, or rather you have to be over 17 to join a service without your parents' consent. And if you do join a service and you are under that age but you have your parents' consent, it also is going to ban showing targeted ads to minors. So in this case it will keep kind of those ads that are specific to your behavioral practices online from being served up to someone who is under the age of 17. But it's KOSA now K-O-S-A that is the issue here, because with KOSA, as I mentioned that duty of care, it basically says hey, google, hey TikTok, hey Facebook, meta, you are responsible for what content gets shown to kids, and if you show harmful content to kids then you are at fault here.

And this is, of course, an ongoing conversation regarding the First Amendment and everything that's involved there, because, as we know, congress shall make no law in regard to the First Amendment and our rights and protection of free speech. And so there's an interesting, an interesting, uh, it seems separation of ideologies in the Senate and in the house of representatives, because the Senate is like, yeah, you know, you saw how it was, what was it? What did I say? 91 to three? Uh, the house of representatives, however, um, is saying, yeah, this is not even gonna, we won't even consider passing this bill in its current form. So who knows if it's going to make it through, but it is, at the very least, interesting to see the kind of wide support for something like this, and it makes me think about, uh, dan, the way that kind of people do get behind things that are allegedly in support of kids, except when it comes to gun rights where that is not.

0:25:23 - Dan Moren
Right, weirdly enough. Yeah, I mean, this has been happening for a long time. I remember back when I was in high school, mid-90s, there was something called the Communications Decency Act, which was also a big push to essentially regulate and protect material on the internet, protect kids from pornographic or obscene information on the internet. Parts of it were struck down as unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment and basically because it infringed on adults ability to basically go and see things they want to do. And I think this is one of the big tricks with these is that normally you have a lot of these cases where, as you said, people are oh, it's the children, so we must get behind it. Right, that is a convenient shield in a lot of cases, because who does not want to protect children? I'm a father, I would love to protect my kid, but at the same time there is a lot of question of what the costs are.

What are the unintended consequences of something like this? What powers are we bestowing on the government in order to make these decisions? Who gets to decide what things are objectionable and what things are not? Is it up to parents? Is it up to the government? Is it up to the service providers.

All of these things are possible interpretations and it can be very tricky to sort of thread that needle.

So I think you end up with a lot of challenges about these sort of intricacies and nuances of these kinds of legislation and, like I said, a lot of times, unintended consequences. There are some things, decisions that get made where you're like, oh turns out that that has really bad effects on people, looking for, say, as we said, lots of people questioning their sexuality, maybe investigating things about transitioning or things like that, which could be considered objectionable by some people, but who gets to decide? And that could end up really harming people who could use access to resources that they may not be able to get to because of this kind of legislation. So, yes, bipartisan, but, like at the same time, I'm kind of curious to see whether or not there are going to be discussions about that and whether or not that will end up affecting the way people decide to vote on this kind of thing, because it's very complicated. They make it sound easy, just protect kids, but it turns out it's a little more tricky than that.

0:27:37 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly that's what it boils down to. For me, this seems like such a it's a clever way to try to get through. I mean, you know, these bills are not small things. There's a lot of legislation that's always involved, with them onto it, you know, painted on there then what all is going on here and how much research has been done and what role has been played for everybody that's involved. There's just too much, and it's at the same time that I you know, I pay attention to that aspect of it.

It also is fascinating to me, again, that the Senate seems completely on board, but the House of Representatives is like in its current form. There's absolutely no way we're going through with this. It's just, yeah, it's kind of interesting seeing how this all plays out and how just our lawmaking bodies do what they do, and do or don't do what they are meant to do, I guess, would be the best way to put it. It's another wait and see, though, because you know changes will have to be made. Yeah, and it's always a long process. Dan Moran, I want to thank you so much for taking some time to join us today on this episode of Tech News Weekly. Of course, folks can head over to sixcolorscom to check out your work, but what are some other places they can go to keep up with what you're doing?

0:29:06 - Dan Moren
Well, I record a variety of podcasts, including Clockwise with Mikah over at RelayFM every Wednesday. I'm also the author of several science fiction novels. My newest one, the Armageddon Protocol, is due out in September. It's up for pre-order now and you can find all that as well as much more about me at my own website, which is dmoren.com.

0:29:23 - Mikah Sargent
Wonderful. Thank you, dan, for your time today. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Mikah. All righty folks, we are up for another break. Before we come back with a great interview I have planned for you.

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Earlier this week, google held its Made by Google event and, as has become, it seems at least somewhat of a tradition here on this show when we talk about Android and when we talk about Google, there's one guest I always love to have join us. It is Jason Howell. Welcome back to the show, jason.

0:31:49 - Jason Howell
Hello, it's me and my dog, Sugar, who probably needs to get her claws clipped because as she walks on the hardwood floor it's a little noisy. So I apologize, but we are here together how are you? Doing Mikah.

0:32:02 - Mikah Sargent
I'm doing well, thank you. I have one dog who is that way. Yeah, she has dark nails, so she has to be taken to someone to get her nails clipped, whereas the other one has clear, so I can clip them myself. So sometimes hers goes a little bit longer, and yeah she tap dances for us. So I think you were actually at the Made by Google event earlier, were you? I was, yeah, how was that.

0:32:26 - Jason Howell
Indeed, it was the first time that I've made it in person to one of Google's hardware events. I'm so used to covering them from a distance and it was actually really cool. I got to say it was just down in Mountain View so I didn't have to fly anywhere. I had to drive for a couple hours to get there, but I saw a lot of really cool people in person instead of online, which is kind of novel in this day and age. And yeah, got to take a look all throughout the three floors of the building where they had all of their efforts displayed. You know all the hardware, software, demos, everything, you name it. It was all there. It was really cool.

0:33:07 - Mikah Sargent
That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm glad that you were able to be there in person and get to do the demos. So, of course, google announced quite a bit at this event, and I thought it would be good to kind of break it up into two parts. So part one is the hardware that Google announced and, yes, you all have to wait for Jason to talk about the AI stuff.

0:33:32 - Jason Howell
It's so hard to pull them apart. That's the challenge, though, is that Google really has integrated all this stuff directly. You know, all the threads are using AI, and so it's hard to talk about one and not the other, but I'll try.

0:33:46 - Mikah Sargent
I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So let's, yeah, let's talk about the new Pixel devices. What are their names, what separates them, what are the displays and, yeah, what's new with these latest Pixels?

0:34:01 - Jason Howell
You're looking for the specs of all the new hardware. I'm super excited to get my hands on some of the new hardware this year. We've got three different standard phones and then we've got a foldable. We'll start with the standards. We've got the Pixel 9, which is kind of your entry-level Pixel, which doesn't necessarily mean it's a low-quality, lower-on-the which doesn't necessarily mean it's a low, you know low quality, um low, you know lower. On the wrong hardware. Necessarily they all have the same tensor. G4 processor inside. The nine has a little bit less RAM than the other ones. It has 12 gigs of RAM, which is pretty good, um the other ones are a step up.

Yeah, yeah, that's a lot. But then you compare it to the 9 Pro and the 9 Pro XL, and I believe the Fold also has the 16 gigs of memory. And why do they need that? Well, because that Tensor G4 doing a lot of AI processing. I mean, google's big on software, which we will talk about a little bit later.

But as for the 9, 6.3-inch display, actual display, which is justa nice brighter display for outside, in fact, 35% brighter than the Pixel 8, comes in a lot. Actually, this was one thing that I really appreciated about being there in person is that I got to see all of the different colors and actually got to talk to the guy who created all the colors for all the devices. And you see the pixel 9, which is the standard, the lower tier, I guess, um array of phones. They have some really cool colors, like wintergreen and peony, which is like a really bright pink. If you think of uh highlighters, there's certain cut types of highlighters that have that kind of like neon feel to it and that's what these colors look like in person. It it was really catching. Yeah, it was really really cool. 20% longer battery life on the 9. $799 is your entry point for their kind of basic phone.

And then you've got the 9 Pro and the 9 Pro XL, which are the step up 6.3 inch display on the 9 Pro, XL has a 6.68 inch, so you're getting larger and larger. Yes, a nice assortment of colors, and still some unique colors, but not quite as vibrant, I'd say. They kind of muted that class of color down for those. And I mean, it's just what really struck me about these phones from a design perspective is the casing, the hardware on the side, like now they have kind of a flat side, but it's really polished, really shiny. It just feels so elegant when you've got it in your hand.

It's just I can't wait to get my hands on one for myself. And that's just the design itself, right. The cameras, they're, they're all sharing. My understanding is they're all sharing the same excellent uh standard two cameras the nine pro and the nine pro xl has an additional camera there, of course, and, um, yeah, they're just really, uh, really nice looking devices. It really seems like google has stepped it up in the design department, redesigned the camera housing, so it's not a straight rectangular bar, it's now this like oblong pill shape. That really is very unique but also looks really nice.

0:37:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I agree, I think it. It does look good and there is a very premium polish to all of these devices for sure. Um, I would be.

0:37:26 - Jason Howell
I would feel quite cool holding one of these phones you're quite cool not holding the phones, Mikah, but with the phone you'd be like a superhero. Yeah, um, I should also mention, just real quick, nine pro 999.9, $1099. So this is kind of the first of the non-foldable pixels that we've seen. That's gone over the $1,000 mark.

0:37:49 - Mikah Sargent
And these are available now, available when.

0:37:53 - Jason Howell
Oh boy, I know that they're available in a couple of weeks. I didn't write down the exact release date for these, but you can definitely pre-order them now. And you should also know that if you get these phones, you get a year of their Gemini Advanced AI kind of suite, which normally is like $20 a month. You get that for a solid year. You also get two terabytes of cloud storage and I'm telling you it's a really smart move on Google's part to give you that long, to not just give you like, oh, in three months, because a year is long enough to get you totally used to it. Get you, you know, figure out a way for these features to kind of make their way into your habit, and it's going to be really hard to undo it a year from now. Yep, that's if you buy into it.

0:38:38 - Mikah Sargent
That's what I was thinking too. It seems like Google thinks the Pixel 9 Pro is going to be a really important seller for it, because the Pixel 9 and the Pro XL will be on shelves on August 22nd. However, the Pixel 9 Pro will be on shelves on September 4th, so that seems to suggest that they're trying to get even more of the pixel 9 Pro than maybe the pro XL and the standard pixel 9. Um, yeah, we'll see, of course, how that plays out, but uh, sure, of course, google also uh has provided the latest foldable. It's cool to still see foldables as part of the Android uh, part of the the Marketplace and what. What's going on with the Pixel 9 Pro fold in comparison to foldables of yesteryear?

0:39:32 - Jason Howell
well, I mean the fold. The original fold was unique when compared side by side with the other foldables in the market. You know the z-fold five and you know xiaomi, and they've all got motorola is pretty notable in the foldables market. For android, the pixel fold went with a different aspect ratio initially and it was kind of more squarish, and what that allowed for is the front cover screen to more resemble the kind of space that you have on a standard phone, so when it's in standard phone mode you don't feel like you're sacrificing.

The Z Fold series is always very narrow and thin on the standard phone front screen and it's actually really I find it really difficult to use as a result as a regular phone. So the original fold addressed that and made things wider. With this new one they've tweaked the ratio a little bit, so they have narrowed it slightly, but they haven't narrowed it to the point to where you're sacrificing, to where you're suddenly getting into whoa, this is too narrow. What they've actually done is they've made it a little bit taller and so it kind of stretches it out slightly. When you open it up that means that you're coming almost more into a zone where it's squared off. It's not quite a rectangle, as much as it is close to a square, you know, playing around with it at the at the event, I did see that, like when you opened it up into foldout mode, gmail is is one really good example of how it's not working. In an ideal sense, gmail would open up in phone mode, so it would take it, so it would stretch everything across the display.

You had to rotate it to the side, where I think you do, where the I think that the system recognizes it's slightly wider, and then it kicks into the dual side mode, where on the left is your inbox and on the right is your email, and it really should be the whole thing when you open it up. That's what you expect. So there's weird little intricacies and differentiations there for developers to adhere to and figure out, google included, obviously, yeah, clearly. But all things considered, I mean, many people are saying after their time with the Pro Fold that this is one of, if not the best foldable attempt that we've seen, and I can't make that claim, but I can say I played around with it for a while. It feels so nice. The whole series of phones just feel really nice in your hand. They feel elegant, they feel expensive.

This one is expensive at $1,800,. Essentially, you get a couple of different color options and you, yeah, you get that interior, eight inch super actual flex display. So it's really cool. Expensive, yeah, a little pricey, but they didn't boost the price of their Fold, which they did with the other ones. They went up a hundred dollars from prices that we've been used to. This one. It's almost like they said well, we can't really boost the Fold another a hundred dollars Right, and so they didn't Right.

0:42:37 - Mikah Sargent
Well, let's move to wearables, because there is a new Google Pixel watch. As is typical when it comes to, I think, wearables in particular and watches, it can be hard to get someone to purchase the next version if they've got the previous version, and so I'm curious did Google put forth here's why this one is the best ever hardware-wise and is an upgrade anyone should make, or do they kind of acknowledge the fact that people who are maybe using the last-gen model wouldn't necessarily want to make this upgrade?

0:43:21 - Jason Howell
I'm not certain that they outwardly acknowledged that fact. They didn't go out of their way to say that. But they do give you, or some users, a very specific and obvious reason to upgrade and that is that there's two sizes now instead of just one. It used to be just the 41 millimeter, which is kind of a smaller watch face, although my wife is hoping that they have an even smaller one than 41 millimeters for her wrist because she's been using the two, the version two, and would like it to be a little smaller. Instead they're offering a larger, 45 millimeter. And so you know, if you have been using the old one and I know there are people I've definitely talked to people that are like I like the Pixel Watch. It's just a little small on my wrist and I want it to be a little bit larger.

You now have that option with the 45 millimeter and you know they've expanded the display to kind of minimize some of the bezel that you get you still get the really rounded kind of curvature of the watch Again, just very elegant and striking.

It's one of the things that I've really loved about the Pixel Watch from launch is it has this really unique elegant kind of roundness to it that when you see it in person, it's just so nice and very satisfying to twist the thing on the side and have it interact with the wear os, that's that's running underneath um up to 36 hours if you're if you're in battery saver mode, but you know, more than 24 hours, uh, if not, that's a hard thing to compare against. Like, my watch right now is the oneplus watch 2 and it's got a dual, a hybrid dual os architecture, and so it can do wear os and last up to like four or five days, um, depending on you know what it's doing at any given time. So google's making progress on battery life, but it can't quite compare to some of the best out there as far as that's concerned.

0:45:16 - Mikah Sargent
But I think really, when you're talking about yeah, I think with the pixel watch 3.

0:45:22 - Jason Howell
I think what's really impressive about this is some of the stuff that we'll talk about in software. That's where it's really going to shine. But as far as pricing is concerned, 41 millimeter 349 for Wi-Fi, 449 for LTE, and then if you got the larger watch size, that's 45 millimeter 399 for Wi-Fi, 449 for LTE, or no. I think it's $499 for LTE, sorry.

0:45:47 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, so you could get up there in price, but those battery life features, those battery life quotes are quite impressive in comparison to the Apple Watch. I will say that, okay, yeah, apple Watch does not last that long at all. Yeah Well, 24 hours is kind of the most, but um, yeah, I try, you know, and that's that, that's they say and then you get it fresh out of the box.

0:46:13 - Jason Howell
You get that and then you got to give it a couple of months let it settle in, get used to how hard it's working for you and it usually comes down.

0:46:22 - Mikah Sargent
And then last in the hardware section is or I should say, are the Google Pixel Buds, the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2, the BP2. So tell us about the BP2. And I know that a lot of this is going to be AI stuff, but outside of that, how does it compare? Do we have better audio? Do we have longer listening time? What's going on here?

0:46:49 - Jason Howell
Yeah, 27% smaller than before, 24% lighter. You've got eight hours with that noise cancellation on, which I think is pretty comparable to what it was before, maybe a little bit longer 30 hours with the case. But really I think the big story here is a couple of things. It's the Tensor A1 chip, which is a chip that is specific to the operation and integration of AI. Yes, like you said, coming into the buds streaming from your phone, all that kind of stuff.

And then you've got a new thing as part of the design is that little nub, if you, if you see the video, if you're watching the video version, you can see on one side is the part that goes into your ear hole and on the other side is this little like half disc or whatever. That didn't used to be there. That's meant to be kind of like a locking mechanism, because that has been a complaint for some people, certain ear types, the buds will fall out relatively easily and that thing. You kind of twist it into place and it kind of locks it into your ear and then they do kind of follow some of the real nice colorways of the pixel 9. So you've got the peony, you've got the wintergreen. Really, I mean, if you, if you're rocking the 9, get one of those those colors and get the earbuds to match it, you're going to look really stylish. It looks really nice in person.

$229 for these and I'm definitely excited. I'm a huge fan of the Pixel Buds series and some of the AI features which we'll talk about make this really exciting as well.

0:48:18 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, absolutely. Um, before, google has done a deal with these and, um, you could get them for. Do you know if they're doing any deals this time, like if you get the oh pro or anything, then you can get them for free, or maybe you don't?

0:48:38 - Jason Howell
oh, that's it. That's a good question. I'm looking right now. I hadn't looked into that, but it looks like you can get $30 in store, credit or gift cards if you pre-order. Let's see here pre-order the Pixel Buds Pro 2 right now you get $30 of credit. So there's that. I don't know if these are paired automatically with the phones. I haven't seen anything about that yet, but, knowing Google, they always have if they don't immediately, eventually discounts galore.

They usually end up bringing these things down about two or three months after release, but I could be missing something there. I apologize if I am.

0:49:21 - Mikah Sargent
That's all right. All right, that is the hardware side. I know Jason is itching to get to the software because, as he pointed out, that was kind of woven throughout the entire event. So let me take a quick break so I can tell you about Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. We would love to have you join the club.

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0:51:18 - Jason Howell
Those are the two letters. How did you know, isn't this? This is just the playbook right now, I swear, and you know, just see, and especially Google, you know that really has cut its teeth on AI for so long. They're reveling in this moment where so much attention is being placed on artificial intelligence and everything. This event, you know, may have been a hardware event, but it was also yet another flex of like and check out all the new things that we're enabling with artificial intelligence.

Primarily, it really revolves around their strategy of Gemini. This is their contextual AI assistant. Gemini can reach into all different facets of Google's products so Gmail, Calendar, drive, all these different places and integrate it into that assistant. They're replacing the Google Assistant with Gemini, which is, I think, a good and a bad thing, like. It's good because I think you know some of the things that we wanted Assistant to do will probably happen eventually. It's bad because Gemini can't quite do all the things Assistant could do yet.

So this is a story as old as time when it comes to Google as far as rolling out new products.

But Gemini Live, which is the conversational AI Assistant experience we saw a few months ago, chatgpt 4.0 being shown off by OpenAI and that was their conversational assistant. That's still kind of in a relatively limited beta thing. So essentially, this means that Google has really beat them to the punch as far as releasing theirs publicly, because Gemini Live is now available for all through the Gemini app and not just on pixel phones, by the way, and so, yeah, that's really kind of like the peak kind of cornerstone of everything that they're doing with AI on mobile. Right now. It's all around that Gemini strategy and getting people to use their AI in ways that are going to reach into all these different apps and make things easier between them, and I'm hopeful of that. But I think they probably still have a long way to go to prove that they can pull it off. And, if they can pull it off, to prove that people are willing to give it a shot, get hooked on it and continue to pay for Gemini Advanced once their one year runs out.

0:53:46 - Mikah Sargent
Right. So one of the things I heard Google say kind of early on was that they kind of bashed, so to speak, other companies mostly OpenAI and the companies that make these systems for showing off a bunch of features that aren't helpful to individuals and that are kind of confusing to understand, right, and that what they wanted to do was show sets of features that anybody could use, that people would want to use, and so I was hoping you could kind of talk about some of the features that anybody could use, that people would want to use, and so I was hoping you could kind of talk about some of the features that maybe stuck out to you that had you going, oh, I can't wait to try that, I can't wait to give that a go. Or if many of these features are already kind of something you're using by way of Gemini online like, will the hardware help to facilitate new Gemini magic, or is this stuff that Gemini can already do?

0:54:53 - Jason Howell
Well, I mean, I think that, yeah, there's some new stuff here and there's some old stuff. Technology companies recognize this moment as an opportunity to kind of get new people through the door with their AI experiences, and they are looking in every single direction possible to find, you know, to like literally throwing strands of spaghetti in all directions and going, all right, let's see what strands actually stick, and so Gemini could do a lot of things with these phones. It's very specific in some ways to the phones themselves. For example, one of the things that I played around with at the event like literally played with it and really thought it was very cool is a feature called Admi, which essentially allows you, with your Pixel phone, to take a group photo. So I'm there, I'm taking a picture of a group of my friends. When I'm taking that picture, I'm in admi mode. I make sure that there's a little room on the side for where I would be standing if I was in the picture, and then I take that picture and then I enlist one of my friends to come over and I get into the picture in that spot and what makes it magical and interesting and useful and not just like, oh, I don't know, we'll just see if it works is that it has an augmented reality overlay of the photo you took first, over the top.

They've used AI to kind of carve out the humans. So you know, we've done this with AI where you put an image in there and you say remove the background, like they've obviously done that, so it's just the humans and then you get in there into the spot standing next to them, it takes the photo, ai does kind of a stitching, merging of the images and you're left with a photo where you're all standing there. It's a little bit on reality. It's not quite reality because you weren't there, but you kind of were because you were there in the moment and you know what I mean it.

No, that's cool. It's very cool and it's very neat how they are combining multiple technologies that they've been working on for years to kind of execute that. So really neat stuff. You've got Magic Editor, which allows you to frame pictures. The example that they showed was a guy sitting in a field and one of his shoes was cut off because the camera was angled. So when you angle it back it kind of fills in around the empty space to kind of add the shoe and any extra landscape area there and then you can use what's called a reimagined feature, which is all done on device but it allows you to, say, replace the field with hot magma, or replace the blue sky with dragons breathing fire or whatever.

0:57:32 - Mikah Sargent
It's all fire related.

0:57:34 - Jason Howell
Yeah, well, that was what I was doing at the event yesterday. Anytime I played around with these things, it was all dragons and magma, so I still have it stuck in my head. I don't know, it seemed fun and actually I was really impressed by the outcome, like the output. I was like, wow, those dragons actually look pretty rad.

But some of these features are kind of sandbox-like, playful-type things that maybe you'll use to pass the time. Some of them are going to be really useful the call notes feature. You know where, when you're on a phone call, you can say, hey, take notes of this phone call so that when I hang up you know, so that I don't have to try like heck to write it all down. And when I hang up it's all summarized and organized. Now it does tell the person on the other line that you're doing that which you have to do by accordance to US law, but that's really useful for me as an ADHD rattled guy. I would love that feature.

And then there's another feature called the screenshots app, which is easy to dismiss, because you're like, oh, screenshots, that sounds dumb. But think about all the times that I've taken a screenshot of something because I want to remember it momentarily, or I want to save it for another time, and they all get lost in the shuffle because they're just screenshots. They're like expendable, disposable things. But what this app does is it uses AI to analyze all of that data, keep it archived for you and make it searchable. You can siphon off different screenshots to certain collections, so your recipes, your whatever, your gift ideas and suddenly all that information that seems disposable and seems momentary becomes an archive that you can tap into without having to like know where to go. You can just enter a search query and there it is, and so those things can be useful If people use it. That's the question.

0:59:25 - Mikah Sargent
Right. Yeah, that's I wonder and I'm curious to see if people end up using this stuff. But there are features like that, like the call notes, like the add me thing, that I think are really really cool and could be super useful. I think are really really cool and could be super useful.

I just wonder how much training people end up having to do. You know, especially like the add me feature. I would love to use that with family members. But on top of taking the photo now I have to tell my friend who's been enlisted Okay, come over here Now we're going to do something kind of weird. Um, so this phone does this, and this phone can do this, and so I'm going to go over there, and then you just tell me to move in closer and, and then they're at, and then everyone's like wait, what's going on? I'm already getting stressed just thinking about how involved that would be. But the thing is, it's such a cool idea and so I want to see it work. You know what I mean.

1:00:20 - Jason Howell
Yeah, I mean I will say, you know, as far as Adme specifically, I had the same reservations about it. I was like, all right, this is like way complicated, Like I just want to take a photo of these people. And now I got to like remember to make space for myself and everything, and I think it's the kind of thing that maybe you'll use it once or twice out of curiosity and I'm guessing that when you do, it's probably going to work pretty well for you and you realize in using it that it wasn't as complicated as you may have thought it would be as a concept. I totally agree. When I finally did it, I was like, oh, actually they do a good job of signaling what you need to do and giving you the readout and all that kind of stuff so that it doesn't overcomplicate things. But I totally agree.

I think that's the real big challenge for all things AI is. We're not we. Tech companies are trying to get us in the habit of thinking about these things and using these things as powerful as they are. The reality is it's counter to what we're already used to and that will always take education and experience and some people have the time and the patience for that stuff and some people are like I couldn't even be bothered, and the worst part is some people who couldn't be bothered. But finally do give it a shot. It better damn well work that one time, because if it doesn't, they'll never use it again.

They'll be like oh no, and I totally talked to people like that that were like eh, like I'm not, I've never used ai, but you know, google kept telling me to use gemini in my dock and so I did and it was horrible and like they're never gonna try it again, you know, and it's gonna always be snake oil to them yep, I agree, um any, any other?

1:01:59 - Mikah Sargent
Any other things you want to say about Gemini and Google AI before we part ways for today?

1:02:08 - Jason Howell
No, I alluded to it a little bit earlier. As far as the watch and I definitely want to talk about this just real quick the Pixel Watch 3 as a hardware device very interesting, but I think what really has me freshly interested in it not for myself, but I know people who are real fitness nuts, who love all the data right Like love tracking data and everything I think the Pixel Watch 3 is going to be an excellent watch for that sort of thing. It really it seemed to be a great example of Google buying. You know they bought Fitbit a handful of years ago and they've kind of resided side by side. In the last couple of years They've started to integrate a little bit of the smarts from Fitbit over into Wear OS and everything like that, which they should do, and now they're starting to integrate Gemini into that whole soup.

And you know the myriad amount of sensors that are on these devices, how people are using them, these running features, building a workout, real-time guidance using the AI to see where you're going and what you're doing and how it pairs up with your goals and all this stuff.

It's really interesting to see how they're taking all of these disparate pieces of data that are coming in from all these different directions and using AI to do what I think AI is probably best at in all the things they can do, which is take information, collect it, summarize it, organize it and summarize it, which, when you get down to it, that's what Google's main mission was to collect the world's information and organize it and make it understandable. And so, to a certain degree, this is a smaller kind of example of that on a hardware perspective taking all this data, organizing it, making it understandable. Hopefully it's useful to people. I'm not that fitness person. I like fitness, but I don't go crazy with the data, but I know people do and I think this watch will be a really good one for them. Awesome.

1:04:05 - Mikah Sargent
Well, everyone should go and check out any and all of the coverage that you are doing in regard to the Made by Google event and if folks are hoping I'm sure folks are hoping to keep up with that, when do they go to get everything?

1:04:21 - Jason Howell
Yeah, I mean we did a podcast. Android Faithful crew did a podcast from the event androidfaithful.com, jeff Jarvis and I talked about it on AI Inside and I shared some of my experience. Right now I'm editing together a package I did kind of like a vlog for the entire day, including some interviews with some of the people there who created these products. I'm hoping to get that up later today. Just go to youtube.com/@techsploder and that'll take you right to most of my coverage the things that I'm doing for myself outside of Android Faithful, which you got to go to that website for.

1:04:55 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Jason Howell, I want to thank you so much for taking some time today to walk us through everything at the Made by Google event. It is always a pleasure to have you on this show, given that you were once the host of this show for new listeners. Thank you for your time today. We appreciate it.

1:05:10 - Jason Howell
I'm here anytime you need me, Mikah. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

1:05:14 - Mikah Sargent
Bye-bye, Bye. And with that we have reached the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That's where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you'd like to get all of our shows ad free, I'll remind you again to join Club Twit twit.tv/clubtwit just $7 a month. I'd love to see you in the club and if you'd like to follow me the places I'm most active online, Be sure to check out Hands on Mac iOS Today, which published in the club, and the newly revamped Hands-On Tech, which is now both a review show and a questions answered show. We've taken Ask the Tech Guys and Hands-On Tech and merged them into a powerful being, so tune in on Sundays at 11 am Pacific time to check out that show. Thank you, and I will see you again next Thursday. Bye.