Tech News Weekly 375 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.
 

00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Jennifer Pattison-Tui of the Verge joins me Mikey Sargent on the show. We talk about NVIDIA helping to launch an AI platform for ASL, that's American Sign Language. We also talk about Jennifer's Skylight Calendar Max review and what we can expect from Amazon next week. Before we head into the interview, zach Hall of 9to5Mac joins us to talk about the Apple iPhone 16E and Scott Stein of CNET gives us an understanding of Humane's AI pin. All that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

00:35 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:43 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is Tech News Weekly, with Jennifer Patterson-Tui and me, micah Sargent, episode 375, recorded Thursday, february 20th 2025. Apple's new iPhone 16e. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am one of your hosts, micah Sargent, and I am joined across this vast and ever-changing landscape that is the internet by the very cool, the very awesome and the very smart home knowledgeable, jennifer Pattison Tui of the Verge. Welcome back to the show, jen.

01:24 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Wow, that was a great intro, thank you, You're very welcome.

01:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Good to see you, happy to be here. Yeah, it's good to get you. So we've got some great stories of the week. I'll actually be kicking things off today, so get ready because we're mixing it up. I wanted to talk about this really cool story over on VentureBeat. It's the sort of games beat section of VentureBeat and that's because it's about NVIDIA.

01:51
For people who might be familiar or not super familiar, for the company, nvidia is pretty well known for making graphics cards and also having kind of games related platforms and and also having games-related platforms and graphics-related platforms for people who are making games and then, of course, also having a pretty big piece of the generative AI pie for what GPUs can do when it comes to training those systems. What's super cool is that NVIDIA is working with the American Society for Deaf Children and a creative agency called Hello Monday to create an online platform that is called Signs, and this platform is actually going to help people to better practice and understand American Sign Language. It is the third most prevalent, according to this VentureBeat article the third most prevalent language in the United States, which may surprise some people. I'm going to guess that English and Spanish are above it and then comes ASL, and this platform is essentially creating like a validated and confirmed data set that can be used to almost kind of grow on itself, because, in the same way that I might say because versus because, or both versus, a lot of people in the Midwest say both, as if there's an L in it and, of course, jen has a different accent from me but is speaking English as well there's the same sort of application when it comes to American Sign Language. People may sign a little bit differently from others and sign language People may sign a little bit differently from others, and so when you're learning, learning from one person and trying to get the sign right, may be, it may depend on you know slight differences, whether it is that you're saying what you expect to be saying.

03:59
Now, one of the things that they talk about in this piece that I thought was kind of important and I don't know that people necessarily kind of think about is that most of the people who are born deaf are born to hearing parents, and so in that situation it leads to family members then wanting to learn sign language to be able to communicate with their child, and I have always thought that American Sign Language was one of the I mean, just coolest languages in general as a very expressive language, and I've used different tools in the past to attempt to learn it, but the idea that you have what they want to have, which is 400,000 video clips representing 1000 signed words, that accuracy and make sure that it works, but then afterward you're able to use this platform not just like in and in and of itself, but also people who are making different apps can tie in with this.

05:14
This platform called signs, and you can go to signs, hyphen, aicom to be able to use this.

05:24
And I just think, ultimately, you know, we think about the different ways that sign language or, excuse me, that AI is impacting us, and we can kind of think of high level things and low level things and things that are, I think, maybe not directly impactful for us, right, and this is one of those that I just think is really, really cool because you can see the direct impact that it has. And also, I love when we learn something new and, arguably, in this case, cool that we actually get to try and so you can go to that website and check it out. But, yeah, I want to hear your thoughts on this as well. Cool that we actually get to try and so you can go to that website and check it out. But, yeah, I want to hear your thoughts on this as well, jen, and kind of you know I don't know if you've seen any other projects like this maybe that have caught your attention. Whenever it comes to AI, providing useful tools, maybe for humanity, you know uh, providing useful tools, maybe for humanity.

06:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
You know, yes, well, this feels like I mean one of. I think I was reading through the article and it says that you know, this ai tool kind of analyze your footage so you get real-time feedback on how your sign language is. So you're literally having it help you. It's being a teacher to help you be able to communicate better and you know, that is seems like such a hugely valuable tool because, especially, as you mentioned, for parents who probably don't, who have children that can't hear, that are deaf, born deaf, and they're trying to learn, it must be so difficult to be able to kind of get the tools and the resources that they need and to have something in their home. They could just use this platform to help teach them. It's like a Duolingo for ASL. That's gonna actually really give you this feedback and help you become more fluent and understand the nuances. I've never used ASL myself, but my husband actually learned it in school, in high school, and then my daughter is going to start learning it next year. She's really excited because it is something they offer in high schools in the US and I mean it is interesting that it is the third most popular, most used language in this country and I think it's great that now it's this. These kind of AI tools are making it much more accessible for more people to be able to learn, so it's a great application for this new compute power, this new artificial intelligence that we're seeing.

07:55
There's been so much in the tech press in particular. You know that's you know not negative necessarily, but you know restrained skepticism about where AI is going to take us and that's, you know, part of our job. But when you see things that could really have such a positive impact on so many people, it, you know it sort of it's exciting. It's that part of technology that really does kind of get you like, wow, this is great and it's so exciting to be part of this and to see where it's going to go and where it's going to lead. So, yeah, I think this is really exciting. Is it available for people to use? Is it available to people to?

08:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
use now. Yeah yeah, so it's not the final full project that NVIDIA and the team want to get to, but you are able to go through the tutorial and you can go through different levels. Whenever you visit the website, it asks you you know, can I use your camera? Can I actually, you know, see the recordings and things like that. And, as you pointed out, one thing that I think is is really important about this american sign language, like other languages, that you learn, you can, you can attempt to learn them sort of in a vacuum with apps, but having that direct feedback and visual feedback and, uh, in particular, having feedback, that is what's what's the word I'm looking for, like that you can, you can trust, I guess, is kind of it's very important, yeah, verifiable, exactly yeah, because you may end up, you know, not realizing, and there's yourself, the wrong way, and then yes, and then you go, you just quit it.

09:42 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
It's like when you teach yourself French and go and say something really stupid when you're in France.

09:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, oh great.

09:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
And everyone laughs at you, which happens to me a lot. Yeah, exactly.

09:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I was going to say sounds like you're speaking from experience a little bit there, just getting a little anxious. But yeah, no, I think that this kind of stuff right, I just I love this, the good stuff, absolutely.

10:06 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Take over humanity stuff.

10:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right, I know that I will be spending some time checking this out, for sure as I kind of, because I didn't. We didn't have it in high school.

10:19
In high school, I learned Latin Me too oh wow, don't use that a lot, latin, except to sort of quickly find your tribe, I think, like, oh, you're one of those, but see, we get it kinship here. But after I was graduated, then they stopped teaching Latin. I was graduated, then they stopped teaching Latin, and at my university they weren't offering ASL until much later. So I was taking some community courses and I really fell in love with it and I'm, you know, sad that I kind of didn't keep up with it. And it is for people who maybe don't have someone around them who they can learn with, or for someone who, because the only way to become fluent in a language truly is to practice and interact, and so I think having some sort of response there is going to be helpful. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how that project builds out and applaud Nvidia for working on something that doesn't seem like it's just about, you know, profit and and that kind of thing, although I'm sure they've figured out a way for that to be part of it as well. All righty, we do need to take a little break here before we come back with our next story of the week from Jennifer Pattison.

11:44
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14:30 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Okay, yes, so one of the things as some of the listeners, viewers may be aware, my main role at the Verge is as a reviewer, and I published a review this week about a product that's actually been out for a little while called the Skylight Calendar. This is their new version. It's the Max, which is a huge 27-inch digital touchscreen display that displays your calendar. Now, I realize that your audience might find this a little pedestrian, because I'm sure a lot of people here know how to use stack board and roll their own type of communal family notice board, of which I do mention different options in my article. But what really interested me about this Skylight Calendar and one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is one of the themes I've been exploring and we've talked a lot about on this show is how AI is used in the smart home and what tools it can bring to us and benefit us in the smart home. Because, as I've mentioned before on the show, there's a lot around AI in the smart home that I feel has some great potential. We've seen security cameras that use AI to give you more relevant alerts, and we're seeing smart home voice assistants hopefully one day get better with AI In fact, we'll talk about that in a little bit more in a little later. But what this has done? They have a new service called Sidekick, and it is an AI powered assistant. You have to pay an annual fee $39 a year. That includes a few other features as well, but what's new about this AI element is you can feed it any data that you like. You can send it an email, you can upload a photo, you can send it an Excel spreadsheet and it will turn it into calendar events and put it on your calendar. Now, if you have children or busy household, multiple members of your home that are always trying to figure out where they're supposed to be or who's supposed to be taking someone where at what time, having a central place where all of your activities arrive so that everyone can see what's going on that isn't your phone, because not everyone in a family has a phone is a godsend, and I've literally have to say that this. I've used this for a month and it has been so helpful. It saved me hours of time in manually inputting my son's tennis schedule, my daughter's lacrosse schedule, all the other things that I have to remember to put on our calendars, and this is something that other services do offer. I think Gemini and ChatGPT you can also use.

17:09
You can input this data and it should send it to your calendar, but, as I described in the article, it just didn't work as well as Sidekiq. And what's really interesting here for me is that this company, skylight has managed to create a very specific AI that really knows you know it has the capability to do exactly what you want it to Like. I could send it I've sent it so many different types of data and it was able to successfully pass them, create calendar events with the correct time, the correct place, you know location to the correct calendar, so to my daughter's calendar or to my son's calendar, and it is just sort of, as I said, I know it's an overused word game changer, but if you're a parent, you've ever had to deal with this kind of stuff or, like I say, not necessarily you have to manage multiple schedules. Something like this is incredibly useful and I just thought it was an interesting use of AI in the smart home and something just thought it was an interesting use of AI in the smart home and something that I'm interested to see if we might start to.

18:09
Next week there is a big Amazon event talking about their new AI powered Alexa Don't speak to me, sorry, sorry and Google obviously has Gemini. Apple is about to announce or bring us, hopefully, a more intelligent Siri, and these are the types of tools I think everyday people are going to find really useful about this sort of AI. At the moment, a lot of AI talk has been sort of I feel like it doesn't feel like it's relevant to a lot of people maybe writing their emails better, these basic things but they can be really useful tools and that's this is something that I found to be incredibly useful and it's one of the first times I've actually found an AI service to really fit into my workflow and life and I found it really, really useful.

18:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So I think so about that, I think there's something to be said for not trying to do everything. Skylight's been around for a while and I actually got my mom a Skylight years ago, whenever it was just a digital photo frame, and then over time I saw Skylight add, you know, the calendar features and kind of grow from there. And what's good about what Skylight's doing and why maybe this is working so well is, again, it's not trying to be everything. The AI can be more purposeful and so you don't. I think, when you've got an AI, that you need it to do your calendar events and you also need it to describe what's inside of a photo and then also generate photo. I mean, it gets so complicated that there's more opportunity for things to get messy. But if you apply it to this one task and say you know, this is the thing that you, this is the thing that I need.

20:02
I really love this idea of because I'm thinking about my calendar app and I use Fantastical and I have for years and I, you know, shout its praises always.

20:15
But what it has offered for a long time is this sort of quick ad feature where you kind of just type into the top and you say you know 7 pm, uh, dinner with blah blah blah, and then it takes those little bits and pieces and puts them into a calendar event and that maybe when I first started using it, uh did something wrong once or twice and from that point on I was done with it because it was a waste of my time to use that. So I always, when I create a calendar event, I take the time to go I want a new event, I'm giving it my title. I don't want the little smart features and of course that's not AI. This is before that. I mean, it is a version of it, so to speak, but it's using data detectors, that kind of thing, and so I have wanted this for a long time, but I have not trusted the systems that have been there to actually make it happen.

21:13 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
To get it, yeah, yeah, to get it right To be successful. Yeah, and that's one of the things. So I tried ChatGPT to do similar instances and Gemini, and that was one of the issues with them. It was harder to sort of check its work, so to speak, and one of the things that Sidekick does is it'll send you an email after it's imported everything. So it does it all for you, but you can then see in the email and delete anything it got wrong with just one click, rather than having to kind of go back to the calendar and check its work. It sort it sort of says here did I do it, is it good?

21:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
are we good? Yeah, see that check-in is nice right and that again I I'd love to speak to the team at Sidekick. Who like who? How did they come to this? Because you, I think you have two choices whenever you are creating this, and the one choice tends to be kind of what the big tech companies do, particularly, in particular, apple is good at this, but also it could be bad, which is the it just works mentality, right. And so when something doesn't just work, you don't get a whole lot.

22:20 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Yeah, you don't get a whole lot of feedback. Yeah.

22:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And Amazon at first was like that, over time, has added in features that I like the sort of you can ask why did that happen? Yeah, and actually get some understanding of what led to you know it, making this choice. Yeah, yeah, I want something that checks in with me and says did I get it right? And you can say, okay, this is good, this is good, this is not.

22:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
And then it learns in theory, from its mistakes and that. And then it also does have. It has a couple other things it can do, like it can take a recipe. If you take a picture of a recipe, it can put that into a like a meal planner for you. And there are also I didn't do this because my kids are teenagers but it has a chore chart and rewards. So it has other features for that $40 a year thing.

23:13
But the sidekick really was the kind of the selling point for me. It's just taking and this is the thing I've noticed with AI we're still at this lower level of benefits Like it can do small things relatively well and take some of those menial chores off your hands, like entering calendar data into your calendar, which is not something anyone ever enjoys doing. I mean, no one's gonna miss having to do that. But the next level is also interesting, like where could this become to do that? But you know, the next level is also interesting, like where you know, where can it? Where could this become? Like, as you say, it's good that they've pinpointed a solution that they can provide. That is useful. But now I'm kind of like what else can it do for me?

23:56 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
So I'm kind of getting excited about what?

23:58 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
and this is why I was mentioning Amazon. Next week has its Amazon event, where we may finally get the new souped up.

24:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Can you talk about our? Can you answer this question? If you can't find, because sometimes these events don't well, a lot of times these events don't stream Will someone from the Verge have press knowledge upon the event taking place? I guess is the question that I'm asking.

24:25 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Well, I'm going to it.

24:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Okay, that's what I was asking, but I didn't know if I could. Good, good.

24:30 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Yes, I'm going to be there, and in fact it was when they announced it, right, I can't remember. I don't think we talked about this. They sent out five invites, different invites to different. Everyone got a slightly different one, or not everyone, but there were five slightly different invites. I saw them on different websites and I was like hang on and I started to put them all together and they actually spell Alexa. Because they didn't actually say what they were going to do. It was very Apple.

24:57
They didn't actually say in the event what it was going to be about, but obviously we kind of assumed. But now that kind of clarified or confirmed that yes, we should hopefully be hearing about this new AI powered or generative AI powered voice assistant, who you know, and Amazon's whole thing with Alexa, which is different really from what we see with Siri and Google to some extent is very much home focused because most of its use is in homes, whereas the other voice assistants are also used on phones a lot, so they have slightly more personal focus to some extent and I think we're going to see I'm hoping we're going to see a real focus on making the voice assistant work a lot better in the home and work better for families. So I'm wondering if we may even start to see and I don't have any insider knowledge here, this is all my speculation start to see how the assistant can really work with our smart homes and people in our homes, because it has the ability to recognize different people in your home and show a different calendar when you approach their screen, because you can use digital calendars on Echo shows. They just don't work that well. That's something I talk about in my review. It's just not that useful yet and I think that AI, in this instance, if Amazon can sort of pull it off, could really bring Amazon's voices in the home to kind of that next level.

26:21
And what Sidekick, what Skylight is doing with Sidekick, sort of to me maybe sort of foreshadows what we might start to see Amazon being able to do, because this is a niche device, to be fair. The calendar it's $650, $660. I forget right off the top of my head. Very expensive. You can get cheaper ones, the smaller ones. I think the cheapest is $200, but still quite a lot compared to, say, an Echo smart display or a Google Nest Hub.

26:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, Because there's no subsidizing going on here, I guess right.

26:54 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
No, I don't think so. Very expensive, yes, but it does look very cool and, like you said, it works as a photo frame digital photo frame as well, but again, you have to pay the monthly fee. So there's some downsides to this, for sure, but as a complete package, they've kind of nailed a really good user experience and service here with this AI Sidekick. If you've got the time to go and roll your own, yay, but lots of busy parents don't, and this is a great solution that I found anyway.

27:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely. Everyone should head over to the Verge to read your full review of that and also, of course, get ready to see what you have to say about the Amazon event. We'll look forward to that. If people want to stay up to date with what you're doing, where's a good place for them to do that?

27:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
Thevergecom is where all my stories will be posted. And then I'm also on Threads and Blue Sky and I think am I allowed to say that I think I'm going to be on Twit this Sunday? Yeah, you can say that it is true.

27:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I hear that. In fact, two of my awesome Tech News Weekly hosts are going to be on Twitter this Sunday. Abraar Alhiti will also be joining, so that's awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. I always look forward to getting the opportunity to chat with you and we'll see you again next month and our listeners. We'll see you again on Sunday.

28:20 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy  (Co-host)
All right, thanks guys, bye.

28:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
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29:56
That's ThreatLockercom, and we thank ThreatLocker for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, we are back from that break and it is time to talk about an interesting February. February I don't usually say that February introduction of an iPhone to the iPhone family. Joining us to help us understand the iPhone 16E is Zach Hall of 9to5Mac. Welcome back to the show, zach.

30:25 - Zac Hall (Guest)
Hey there, thanks for having me again.

30:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, Pleasure to have you join us. So obviously the first question is what does the E stand for?

30:32 - Zac Hall (Guest)
Everything.

30:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Everyone, all of us, wait, all of us. No, apple announced the iPhone 16 E to go along with the iPhone 16 lineup and this is, in theory, apple's affordable phone. Can you tell us, first and foremost, about price and kind of initial specs and understanding of or initial reactions of what this device?

30:59 - Zac Hall (Guest)
is Sure, the iPhone 16 E is E-fordable. Sure, the iPhone 16E is e-fordable. It replaces the iPhone SE third generation and the iPhone 14 in Apple's current iPhone lineup. And so the SE3 was the old iPhone 8 design with Touch ID, the home button, big bezels and everything no face ID, and that costs $429. Most recently, the iPhone 16E is a bit more expensive, at $599 and up, but you've got more storage and you've got a whole lot more features, including face ID and this full screen display with no home button, better camera system, a lot more battery life. So it's more expensive, but you get sort of a five or six year generational leap in terms of what technology is being offered there.

31:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That makes sense, that you know, when we compare it to the SE of yesteryear, this phone starts to make a lot more sense versus kind of comparing it as the affordable model to go with the other models that exist, where then people kind of are going okay. But I will be honest with you I said this on my show yesterday that when I first saw the phone and I saw it had one camera lens on it, my initial thought was like oh wow, that reminds me of an iPad and iPad camera equals. And so I suddenly was starting to feel a type of way about this phone before I had to sort of step back and go OK, hold on, let's take a second to think about this. With this phone we do have an action button. Do we get the capture button on this little baby?

32:46 - Zac Hall (Guest)
There's no camera control. There is the action button, and one thing that it does on the iPhone 16E is you have this Apple intelligence AI feature called visual intelligence. On the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, where this feature originated, you use the capture button, the camera control, you hold it down and it opens up this mode where you can scan objects, images or you know things in your real world environment and you can look up things about those on Google or chat to BT or even, like, translate something or add it to your calendar. This is available on the iPhone 16 E through that action button. So you do lose the ability to assign that action button to something else, or you can use it. You can access it from camera, from the control center, and those two features are being backported to the iPhone 15 pro, which has Apple intelligence but not visual intelligence because there's no camera control.

33:37
Something else about the iPhone 16 that I should mention is that, even though it's not affordable compared to or it's not, you know, as good of a, maybe it's good of a value compared to the iPhone SE generation, which was usually, you know, $430 or $500. It is, you know, affordable compared to the iPhone 16, which is $800 and up, or the iPhone 16 Pro, which is $1,000 and up. So looking at a $200 and $400 difference there is $1,000 and up.

34:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So looking at a $200 and $400 difference there Makes sense. Now one thing that stood out to me initially was the lack of MagSafe wireless charging in the device, and initially that alone kind of felt a little surprising to me. Felt a little surprising to me. But on 9to5Mac something else was pointed out, which is that you lose MagSafe charging, but you also lose MagSafe in terms of accessories, and I have to say with my phone I'm used to thwacking it all over the place, like right now it's technically a charger, but even if there wasn't a charger here, I just like to have it sort of magnetically placed there. I know a lot of people do it in the car. Any insight into the lack of MagSafe here? Is it just a cost thing? What do we think?

34:57 - Zac Hall (Guest)
It must just be a cost thing, and, you know, one theory was Apple's using their own modem. Now they're replacing Qualcomm modems with their own C1 modem in the iPhone 16E. It's the first time they're using an Apple modem, and so, you know, my first guess was maybe the magnet interferes with the modem. That could be an issue. Maybe there's not enough space to sort of, you know, separate the magnet from the modem, but I don't really think that's the problem, and Apple even said today that that's not why they didn't include MagSafe. They didn't say why they didn't include it, though.

35:28
One thing that we're seeing, though, is that accessory makers like Spigen, for example, they're making cases that have MagSafe magnets so that you can do things like attach a wallet or a pop socket you know holder, for example. What you won't get is, you know, probably is that wireless charging that max safe offers. So you, it does have wireless charging, the old chi standard, where it's just wireless, but not the new chi 2 or what apple made with max safe back in the iphone 12 days, which is it snaps into place magnetically and it charges efficiently, giving you faster wireless charging speeds. So it's a very weird omission, but it's one that you can sort of overlook when you look at what else you get with the iPhone 6E, especially the newer processor and the more RAM that supports Apple intelligence and other new features.

36:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You wrote an article for 9to5Mac and it was kind of interestingly entitled something along the lines of "'Don't buy this phone'" and you're going. Which phone is Zach talking about? Can you tell us a little bit about your insights there? I want people to go and read it so we'll link to it in the show notes. Sorry, anthony, I did not drop that in, but yeah, it's. Is it the 16E you're talking about?

36:41 - Zac Hall (Guest)
It's not the 16E, sort of surprisingly, it's the iPhone. I'll just give it away here it's the iPhone 15. And the reason for that is the Apple lineup right now for the iPhone includes since the SE3 and 14 went away yesterday it includes the iPhone 15 and then iPhone 16E, 16 and 16 Pro and you think, okay, that's least expensive to most expensive. But in fact the 16e is 100 less than the 15, but you get more uh hardware oomph. With the 16e. You get a sort of two-year generationally new chip and you get more ram and you get the 15.

37:18
So my advice for anyone buying a new iphone in 2025 is, if you're looking at the 15, you probably don't want a 16 or 16 pro. You probably should look at the 16 E instead. And you know, I think the the E is a little confusing. It's like what does that mean? And for all intents and purposes, it's an SE4. It's an older design. It's, you know, this year's hardware and an older design that Apple will probably sell for the next few years without updating it. But I think it's a better value than the 15, because the 15 does cost $100 more now and we'll probably lose iOS support maybe a year or two before the 16E does you know? You're just on the road.

37:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely. The one thing that I've heard people talking about is, with the SE, you have ambiguity because it's not tied to a number. Do you think there's anything to that in terms of this now being a 16E? Will we then see 17E, 18e, or is it more likely that in the lineup I mean Apple's still selling older models of iPhone this just becomes that model, that is, the lower cost model, because you even mentioned there. You know, you see that it probably is going to exist for a few years.

38:35 - Zac Hall (Guest)
Yeah, I think so I think we won't see a 17E or an 18E. Maybe we'll never even see another E. You know, we've had one-off iPhone versions, versions that are sort of the cheaper, more affordable model the iphone 5c and the iphone 10r. So c and r, only one, one versions of each of those phones. So we could only have one c.

38:52
But I think what's nice here is it is sort of clever marketing to frame it as a 16e because it has the internals of a 16. For the most part in the past, like the original iphone SE was the shape of an iPhone 5 or 5S but it had the internals of an iPhone 6S. So there was only kind of a two-year gap there. But Apple kept it around for two or three years before making it look like an iPhone 8. And it was sort of hard to track. Then Is the SE1, se2, se3, what are those phones? And by saying 16E it makes it feel newer than the 15, much newer than the 11 through 14. And we'll be able to keep track of it easier in the future too. Oh, it's like the 16E is less than the 17, less than the 18. All those phones are sold next to it, I believe.

39:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely To round things out, I'd love to hear your take on who exactly the phone is for and maybe you can give us some understanding of availability and when people can take a look at this phone and have it in their hands, etc. Etc.

39:56 - Zac Hall (Guest)
Sure. So I think, the iPhone 16E. Again, if you're looking at the iPhone 15 as an option, maybe look at the 16E instead because of the longevity it will offer. But if you're currently an iPhone SE user of any sort or use an iPhone 11 or iPhone 12 or 12 mini, then I think Apple is especially looking at you because they've got all these different comparisons in terms of battery life and performance on their website and in their press release. That shows just how much better the 16E is compared to those phones and I imagine if you've got maybe a 13 or a 14, then you may be holding out more now or more likely to go to a plain old iPhone 16. But yeah, if you've got a 12 mini or a 12 or older, then this 16E, I think, is probably a pretty good bet for you, and the pricing starts at $599. Pre-sell is available. Pre-orders start tomorrow and Friday at 8 am Eastern time and the phone starts to ship one week later. So next Friday it'll start to arrive in stores and reach customers.

41:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Awesome. Well, Zach, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today on the show. If people would like to keep up with what you're doing online, where's a good place for them to go to do that?

41:12 - Zac Hall (Guest)
You can always read 9-5 Mac, and I'm also on social at ApolloZach as well. Thanks, micah.

41:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Good to see you, you too. Bye, all righty folks. We're going to take a quick break before we come back with our next interview.

41:26
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44:25
Hey thanks, good to be back on. Yeah, it's good to have you back. So let's kick things off by talking about Humane's AI pin. If people didn't hear about it when the hype was kicking off, can you tell us what it was, what it aimed to?

44:40 - Scott Stein (Guest)
do Sure. So this of uh emerged as this extremely hyped device that looked kind of futuristic and former former apple uh engineers and designers who wanted this to be the future beyond phones. You know it was one of a wave of ai assisted gadgets that wanted to be there for kind of an ambient interaction. Uh, bring up things, look at the world with a camera, respond to your voice and also replace your phone, because this had its own phone plan and did not connect to cell phones at all.

45:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Wow, okay, yeah, so it really was trying to shove into and take over a pretty, you know, steadfast market, which is not an easy thing to do. Yeah, we've got some video of your review. Very Star Trek. I love that. I was hoping that you know. Now that we know what it was aiming to do, and I think maybe people who are listening are going. Yeah, that's kind of hard. Tell us about the latest news regarding the AI Pen, what is happening to it and if one of our lucky listeners or viewers were one to get one of these, what can owners of the device expect going forward, matthew.

45:54 - Scott Stein (Guest)
WALKERMAN yeah, I hope you did not get one of these, but the announcement was that it's being sold, basically for the IP to HP for, I think, $116 million. It kind of reminds me of Palm or WebOS all these things in the past that got eaten up, or even when Google acquired Pebble, and Pebble was a far, far more successful device and is actually coming back. So it's probably a bad analogy. But in the meantime, this is going to lose its data February 28th and there's no recourse. It's going to be a little disposable item that they encourage you to recycle and no refunds unless you've recently bought it. So that's really upsetting. You've recently bought it, so that's really upsetting. And because they put it on an island and it does not connect with phones, there's no other way that you get it to function.

46:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Holy moly, in the announcement for this, was there any sort of remorse at all involved? I know, probably not, because lawyers are going, you can't be remorseful, but like that seem to say you can't get a refund for this thing, it seems. I mean, it wasn't even what we'll talk a little bit about, your review. It wasn't even a full year ago, right. This thing hasn't been out that long and yet they're claiming that. And especially with the acquisition by a larger company, one would hope that, you know, maybe there's a little money there to, to to give people their money back. What's been the reaction, I guess? And yeah, that initial question of what did the company have to say about we're not giving anybody money back unless you bought it recently?

47:38 - Scott Stein (Guest)
I mean it seems like kind of like a thank you for the journey type of response. But you know it's uh. Reactions have been really upset, obviously, but uh, but also, you know, since people didn't people acknowledge that it was a bad product from the get-go, I think this was also like an rip um ai gadgets terribly conceived AI gadgets type thing, which I thought some of the ideas they had were really interesting. The problem was they didn't work as I expected them to and it's not interesting. And it wasn't interesting in its current form and it wasn't useful to me.

48:21
But also, what's concerning is that anytime you have a device like this that's so service-based you're really just kind of like renting the service and then in the past you'd have a device that probably would have still functioned in some way even without software updates. There are game consoles that are like that, and that's definitely not the case, because it's all coming from their servers, which are going to have all the data wiped off of them.

48:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, that is the kind of, in my opinion, really ridiculous part of this. You know, you think about a Pebble in that example and how people were able to keep using Pebble and there were like third-party hacks for it, or even Amazon that at one point offered those little dash buttons where you could order goods by pressing the button. People figured out how to hack those and use those as like smart home buttons. There've been all sorts of these gadgets that lost access to whatever services were available. But, yeah, you could do so much locally.

49:21 - Scott Stein (Guest)
People would hack the Pebbles too, to bring up the Pe, the Pebble analogy. There was that movement too.

49:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, and so that's really disappointing. Again, I wonder if it kind of probably not, but I wonder if there's any sort of cooling on the enthusiast market to grab these things up as soon as they come. But then I think things like Kickstarter would not be as successful. If that was the case, I think people like to be in on the get-go. I do wanna talk a little bit about your review just under a year ago. I do need to take another quick little break, and then we'll be back with that and also your kind of retrospective commentary on what went wrong or what the company could have worked on to make things a little bit better.

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52:22
All right, heading back into the show, I am joined by Scott Stein of CNET, who is here to give us an understanding of what is going on with the Humane AI pin. Now, as we mentioned before the break, when this device first came out, you had a wonderful video review and you know a full on review of this device first came out, you had a wonderful video review and and, uh, you know a full on review of this device. What were your thoughts about the device at the time? Um, was the writing on the wall for you then, or was there at least some level of?

52:55 - Scott Stein (Guest)
this is new and interesting and maybe this is a category that could exist so I tried wearing it, not just around the office, but I brought it with me to Disney World along with Meta Ray Bands, because it was at the time I was about to travel and I really wanted to give it a chance around Epcot even, and go to the Try, using the Translation, around the World Showcase. That wasn't part of the video but I had it mentioned in the write-up. But both in big situations like that and in small, it wasn't functioning well. Not functioning well is really an understatement. Not only the AI kind of gave answers, but I also it overheated. It overheated at the drop of a hat because it used this incredibly ornery projection system that used lasers that would project onto your hand so you'd hold it up and it would bring this projected display that you use hand gestures to interact with, super sci-fi sounding and kind of like augmented reality. What I saw in there was a little bit of a future, of like in glasses, if you bring up your hand and bring up something like in Vision Pro. But the difference here is that in the real world that display gets projected on your hand and it keeps moving depending on where your pin was placed. So getting it to center, getting those hand gestures to work, um, and then it would overheat. So the if it was kept on for more than like 20 seconds, oh my god down, because it was overheating between the cellular and, I guess, the projections and which is which is which is nuts. So there was that. And then also just having it like kind of sagging on my sweater and like being this weird pin was a weird way to live.

54:32
I mean, I like that it connected magnetically, although passing power through my clothing was a little weird, like I didn't know how that would work long-term and I think also probably inefficient.

54:44
But I liked some of its design flair ideas, but they just didn't turn into anything. And the other thing is that because they didn't connect with a phone, not only did it not play notifications or anything or take a phone call from your phone, but also just for setup If you want to connect to a wifi network, I had to like tap like the passcode with like my fingers using the projected display on my hand, like I was. I was kind of losing it from that. I mean, there's like a web, there's a web interface for setting up some of that stuff, but a lot of stuff gets done on the device and it. It just drove me crazy because the phone in your pocket already does so much of this stuff, and they were willfully ignoring the phone, whereas something like Meta Ray Bans, which came out with its AI features around the same time. I still wear those a lot and it's because the AI is really just like a gimmick. The rest of it has other features that you might use instead.

55:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it seemed so cool. I remember at the time I thought, oh, it seems so cool, but it's just like it was a cool concept and then, as it played out, you're going oh right, this is not what you thought. Now you wrote this retrospective commentary and talked about the failing of this product and I think, like you said, the big thing there is it shoving into a category that was already just fine. But it does have me wondering is there anything in this sort of category of devices, any compelling devices that stick out to you, that do feel like there's a place for it? Or is the sort of AI augmented device doomed to fail because we have smartphones that can access so many of the other AI services?

56:41 - Scott Stein (Guest)
I've never liked the idea of having AI manage your life because it's so diffuse and I like to make individual decisions that a lot of the whole metaphor of AI being your personal agent bothers me. And that is the problem when you have like a whole AI based OS is that there's no out. That is the problem when you have a whole AI-based OS is that there's no out. There's no escape hatch where you can just use it like a regular phone or something else. But I do think that things that are extensions of your phone make sense, right. So, like smartwatches we already wear smartwatches. The AI pin was almost being like a smartwatch on your chest, but without some of the features, and so I feel like those are going to add more ai features. Um, glasses are interesting to me because, again, anything that's a peripheral to what you're carrying with you. But I think the moment you start saying, and I'm I love the future, but if you're gonna say I'm replacing your phone, um, when you know when is that going to happen? Right? Who's leaving their phone at home? I, I don't think anyone I know in the universe would be like I'm leaving my phone at home. I'm going to carry this random thing with me because you you could get in. You know you could get lost, you get in trouble. Their security, you know their payments, the emergency calls there's a lot of.

58:02
Your phone is important, absolutely, I do think, and also working with the apps you have and the AI that you're used to using.

58:10
Ai is so all over the place right now that if you're going to even get traction to use it for everyday functions, I think it needs to be something that works comfortably with the stuff you have, and so you know I don't want. They had their own Cosmos OS which hooked in to some AI services, but it only connected to like title music player, didn't play other music and some other features weren't added yet, so it was like you had to wait for them to hook in all those things. That was unacceptable and that's part of the problem still with Metaglasses too, is that they don't fully hook in to all the stuff that you'd want. But I don't use the AI features much. On Meta's ratings, I play with them, but I use it mainly for wearable headphones and for the camera thing and the AI. It's an experiment and I like playing with it, but it's like as a bonus extra. I can accept that, but as the main event for those two, I would be annoyed.

59:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Look, I love getting the chance to talk to you. You have a lot of insights about the tech that is taking off right now as we look to this sort of AI and augmented future, and so it's always a pleasure to have you join the show and chat with us. Thank you for taking the time to join us today to talk about the Humane AI pin. Everyone should go read that retrospective that you have, and also, I think, even the initial review of it, just to it's kind of nice to remember where we were, where we are and how quickly these things can change as well. If people want to stay up with what you're doing, where's a good place for them to do that?

59:41 - Scott Stein (Guest)
You can follow me on Blue Sky, scott Stein. I think there's another Scott Stein too, who I'm friends with, who's a novelist, so you might get him by accident. You can follow both of us. There you go, and Blue Sky is where I'm at mostly at this point. And yeah, and also on CNET.

59:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks a lot. All righty folks. That brings us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly.

01:00:04
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Thank you all so much for tuning in. Be sure to check out my other shows Hands on Mac, hands on Tech, ios Today which are all published on Thursdays. So yes, those will be available to you then as well. Thanks so much. If you're looking to follow me online, I'm at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahuacoffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online and we'll catch you again in the future.

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