Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm Alford Aang Amazon signed a deal with Apple this month to allow the online retailer to directly sell many more Apple products and just in time for the holidays the agreement should benefit most Amazon customers but some third-party sellers are being left out in the cold with only authorized Apple resellers allowed to sell through Amazon so I had a chance to talk to one of these sellers and he's pretty pissed he's done happy about it he got to build up his business on Amazon over the past five years and he feels pretty jilted about the situation and feels like Amazon really isn't helping him out toll is obviously not helping him out in this situation either I mean I feel like I'd be pissed too if I you know we're building a business selling all these phones and then out of the blue you know Amazon just says hey you can't tell us any more this is all Apple's domain now yeah the other so he didn't actually sell phones as far as I could tell what he did was sell a lot of discontinued products which were harder to find it was actually really interesting to find out that he sold like hundreds of discontinued Apple keyboards that the company was no longer making it was no longer supporting but if you are a fan of this particular keyboard or this discontinued iMac desktop you would be able to buy it through him yeah Apple has always been problematic with that with buying just essentially reused products or anything like that it's more so just hey just come through us and buy the really expensive version instead of getting a used version of this right which is probably why Apple probably doesn't mind so much about losing these types of listings and neither would Amazon because there really isn't nearly as much money as selling the new iPhone so yeah also alfred you wouldn't talk about super smash brothers so let's just do that right now all right so we got to play for four hours at an event from Nintendo about two weeks ago I played spent most of my time playing against nairo he's one of the best Super Smash Brothers players in the world and as good as I think that I am at the game he basically beat me up for about an hour and a half I mean he's like one of the best players in the world but I my first impressions of it is that it's much more competitive than Super Smash Brothers for the Wii U was or Super Smash Brothers Brawl was and I think it has a lot more potential to be as competitive as melee on the Gamecube was there's just a lot of factors to it it's more punishing there's more options for countering the characters feel a lot more balanced I can go on and on about this yeah yeah no definitely um do you think it being more competitive will actually benefit the game or turn off novices and you know I mean I think yeah because I think Nintendo's is finally starting to see the competitive scene for Super Smash Brothers they've been going to tournaments they were at Evo which is the largest fighting game tournament in the world they were there to basically promote the game they had a bunch of demo stations there they have been inviting these like high-level players to these events like nairo was the only non press person there and he was just kind of and it wasn't like a big announcement or anything that he was there it was just kind of like playing and I like recognized him so I went to go play with him was it fun to get like completely cleared most people would not think that that's fun most people like actually want to be good at a game that they're playing but I I would liken it to like going to a basketball like showcase or something and then just playing against like Kobe Bryant like one on one the whole time like he'll destroy you but like I had a lot of fun in that because I felt like I was actually learning from it and getting better at the game so yeah last Facebook is back in hot water big surprise there this time because of a New York Times investigation from last week that found that the company repeatedly botched its handling of a Russia meddling operation on its social site there was also news that it hired a DC consulting firm that was reportedly trying to discredit its critics will see what Facebook ends up doing in this latest situation where are your thoughts yeah Mark Zuckerberg hosted a press call last week on this I believe it was on Thursday where he basically kind of deflected all the blame saying that he had no idea that they hired this company and he doesn't know who was responsible for it which a lot of people are very suspicious about considering he's the CEO of Facebook and wasn't aware of that yeah and he he continues to say that you know after being made aware of it from the New York Times article that that's when he decided to end that relationship with definers but you know again a lot of people very skeptical of this but he also mentioned on the call to reporters you know this Facebook is a pretty big company he's not gonna be aware of everything that goes on with it I mean okay that is true but still anyway if you want to read more about these stories check them out on CNET I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm Afra ding thanks for listening and thus concludes the recording of the audio podcast go ahead and send in your questions and comments about today's stories specifically about smash bros hey Alfred you want to try out that present I gotcha oh this one oh you got that for me I didn't know that yeah I got a few for smash oh I mean it's an okay game I guess I figured if anybody needed a hype button on the week of smash it would be you well it's not the week of it it's coming out in December seventh that's not weeks from now yeah we're gonna talk about it for three more weeks at least and then we're gonna talk about it when the game comes out it was really fun though they also had booths set up for the single-player mode I didn't write about it at all that's the adventure mode yeah so if you watch the most recent trailer they had this whole world of light thing where this like energy force like blasts all the characters except for Kirby and then you have to go around the world and like save all of them from being trapped you have to be Kirby yeah adventures start you start with Carly and then you rescue Mario and then you can play if Mario necks and then you rescue all these other characters so I played through that a little bit I also play through the classic mode where it's just matchups but it's like based on different themes so if you're playing with a like a fighter kind of character like Captain Falcon or let's just go Mario just cuz it's simpler like you you'll fight only people that like fight with their fists instead of like swords and stuff like it'd be play of a character with like a like a laser gun you'll fight like space characters instead throughout it so it's like themed now and then the final boss like it used to just be like this Master Hand like this big hand that comes in like oh yeah so now it's like based on your character if you're Mario you fight Bowser at the end for example oh that makes a lot the weird hand yeah I only played by the way the the Super Smash that I played was the n64 yeah so a lot of yes I'm aware I'm super old yeah so yeah what was I gonna ask you anyway we'll go to questions while I try to remember what I was going to ask Alfred sure so first up from Timothy he's asking will Amazon eventually accept other PayPal payments that's a good question I always kind of wish that they would incorporate some more options as far as payments and while we're at it do you think Amazon's ever is going to take Bitcoin Alford's face says it all the the Bitcoin one is probably much more unlikely but PayPal that situation has been in rumor for years it seems unlikely that would actually happen in the United States because a lot of people that are Amazon customers Amazon already has your credit card information so what's the point of adding in your PayPal account from what I've heard about it it's more likely to happen in places like Europe where maybe that PayPal integration might make it a little bit easier to shop on Amazon but so far if it's if customers were complaining and we're trying to get PayPal on Amazon then Amazon may have actually tried to do this a while ago but it doesn't really seem like customers are clamoring for it and that's why it hasn't happened I would say that PayPal amylum would be much easier to use if you could just use PayPal and not have an account but I would also argue that like the majority of people on Amazon have an account there like mostly for Amazon Prime exactly yeah and tens of millions of customers also have Amazon Prime which means that you know they have all your information already and they make it so easy to buy on Amazon that you know you've got like one-click shopping and also you know subscription services where it's immediate reordering it'd just be nice that if you didn't want to use Amazon Prime like you know that you you don't order enough stuff off their website to warrant like having that kind of subscription for what is it like a hundred dollars a year now order it just got increased to $119 okay yeah so like if you know that you don't buy that much from Amazon to warrant that like to be able to just pay with a PayPal account would be nice but I can understand why Amazon would not do that just so to get you to sign up for their website so yeah makes sense yes good question though that's definitely like something that's been like in in my world for for quite a while so let's talk about solving the issue of the small business on the internet e-commerce why wouldn't this guy just use eBay a great question he does sell on eBay only 10% of his businesses on eBay and you know I have eBay sources that I talked to but this is this is what this guy said so and it's fairly unvarnished he was just basically like Amazon's like going to the mall whereas eBay is like going to a flea market so you just the the ability to sell is much better on Amazon according to him it's just people tend to go to Amazon more Amazon's obviously a much bigger ecommerce platform so he does plan on liquidating a lot of his stuff that unfortunately being able to sell on Amazon he's gonna liquidate it through eBay but from what he said he's hoping to maybe switch to different brands and maybe diversified to a variety of brands as opposed to like really you know focusing on just Apple going forward but doing it through Amazon because eBay just hasn't been as successful for him all right next up let's take one from the - do you really think Bezos and musk want to work together you know unless it's to rule the world what is this about I'm not really sure what the mask thing I just thought it was a tasty tidbit to think about those - there might be some Bezos musk news that I hadn't caught on - that's your job and yeah you know what I do miss something sometimes unfortunately okay well moving on then from Aaron Amazon should sell Google's products it would generally help both of them out because they could benefit from adding Amazon services on Google devices and easily weren't that well we've already been down this road before I myself get very frustrated with trying to watch YouTube on my fire stick is there any word on any kind of calming of that quarrel that feud between Amazon and Google anytime soon no not really because they have so many more areas for which to argue about Amazon's getting deeper into advertising Google's getting deeper into smart home so they're both kind of poking each other in the eye Google is also doing a lot more in e-commerce not like there with with Google shopping or what is it called Google Express they have a lot more partners where it's like whether it's Walmart or Costco or Target so there's just a lot more points of friction than maybe there were before so and it does kind of suck for customers obviously because they're the ones that end up losing out in a lot of ways but I don't really see a situation where Amazon would start selling Google smart home progress it's like yeah it's like how you know Apple with this deal with Apple and Amazon you know they're selling more accessories and devices but you know somehow the home pot is missing from there I wonder why right so even with like a partnership even with them going buddy-buddy with Apple they still left out the home it's obvious reason it basically sounds like you know Amazon is saying you can eat at our table but you don't eat off of my plate and Google like directly feeds off of Amazon's play with like the smart home department yeah I mean there are probably Google products that are on the Amazon Marketplace you could probably find them pretty easily it's probably the pixel 3 I'm guessing through the marketplace I'm gonna try to find it right now but they do have like a hard ban on a lot of the smart home product so you're not gonna find a Google home Google home max Google home Mini they're just not gonna be available maybe some of their accessories are gonna be available like a dock or whatever but yeah Amazon clearly knows that if you're coming to their website we want you to buy Ecco products not Google products next one coming in from our old friend syringe oi weren't discontinued Apple products already available on eBay from high rated sellers both new and used sellings this online seller already had stiff competition before Amazon came in I think I think it was more just like people there's much less people on eBay than there are on Amazon and people are much more willing to buy on Amazon I think that market has always been there on eBay but you know I don't know what it is about eBay people just like shopping on Amazon more absolutely yeah it's an unfortunate reality for eBay Amazon just just to get an idea for people about how much bigger Amazon is in the United States than eBay Amazon takes about 50 cents of every dollar in u.s. ecommerce that's 50 percent of the market whereas eBay takes about six to seven cents and they're number two so there's there's Amazon which is all the way up here then there's eBay and then there's I think it's Walmart and Apple so mmm it's not even close you can definitely try to salvage some of your business by switching over to ebay but unfortunately for somebody that's been selling on Amazon for five years and this guy was selling like hundreds of thousands of dollars of stuff yeah you're maybe you'll eventually get back to it on eBay but not as likely from APEC why don't all the main producers of phones etc just come together and allow cross-platform it would benefit everybody and while they're at it why can't we just get anything we want on the platforms we want if people want to buy a product they're just gonna buy it so and why not just offer it across the board on Amazon Google and etc you want to you want to field this one I'm looking something up right now it's a-ok but if you want it I'll do it I'll do it yeah there are a lot of things that would be beneficial for customers that giant companies obviously don't end up doing and that might seem a little mystifying for customers sometimes when Amazon presents itself as being very customer centric but big surprise they're not customer centric all the time and they don't benefit small sellers all the time even though they market themselves to be doing that and being like a friend and a partner of small sellers so that's and that's a big reason why I wrote the story is because that's that's that's how these companies do present themselves but it's not the case all the time that's pretty obvious there's a quote from a Silicon Valley that I always think about when I think about this when like things could be so much better if everyone just decided to work together and like you know make platform like products cross-platform and things like that but I so from Silicon Valley Gavin Belson he's like the CEO of hooli which is supposed to be like a fake Google Apple kind of company and he basically says I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do so everyone wants to and all of these companies want to improve the world but they want to be the one to do it and it's it's incredibly frustrating but I that's kind of the stage of affairs and and you know big tech I would say right and you also point to the fact that if you were gonna have some sort of cross-platform stuff who is gonna call the shots yeah is it gonna be an independent board is it gonna be the company that ended up winning the big competitive like products war at some point and now everybody's gonna you know follow their lead so it's it's hard to say how that would work and whether this situation is slightly better in certain ways because no single company calls all the ships all the time also just take conflicting interest and and you know what like products people are selling like Apple has taken a very different stance on data privacy than a company like Facebook or Google has or Amazon has even because they have totally different but yeah exactly yeah but anyway great question and definitely kind of gets to the heart of why these things happen in the first place so let's take a little bit of poll hunters asking which one do we shop on and I think this is kind of including an entire audience Amazon or Ebay I myself have had positive experiences and negative experiences on both more positive than negative but I definitely go to Amazon more frequently because of the simplicity and just kind of bare-bones I don't want to fight for a price I don't want to haggle I just want to get the thing I want what about you guys I mean it depends on what I'm shopping for like if it's a vintage like t-shirt or pair of sneakers like I know I'm not gonna find that on Amazon well see that that used to be my train of thought - and then Amazon's inventory greatly expanded to a lot of obscure stuff I never really thought I would find on Amazon I used to love hunting around for like old analog music equipment on eBay but the more and more small businesses that got involved with Amazon you found a lot more of that stuff readily available yeah for me most of the time I shop on Amazon I absolutely do shop on eBay for kind of the longtail stuff yeah the stuff that's like a little bit harder to find I did have one negative experience from eBay which was like I remember it because it was so annoying basically I ended up buying where does a planet Earth - and it the European version which wasn't gonna work on my blu-ray and the guy explicitly said it other than his list things you cannot cancel after you've made the purchase no matter what and I tried to cancel within like 20 minutes once I realized what the problem was he gave me such a hard time it was almost impossible and then he forgot to mail it to me I called eBay about this they told me there's nothing they could do about it whereas when I call Amazon customer service yes they like bend over backwards to be like yeah sure whatever you know you broke this thing a year later but you know what what do we care yeah so but I I will say that that did stand out to me but that's not the situation that's not been the case most of the time when I do buy on eBay yeah they definitely have a very different customer service experience from both of them I mean I think because when you're dealing with eBay you're like specifically dealing with the seller most of the times so you're like getting a different bet like every time like you buy something whereas if Amazon you're not that being said though I still think that most people should use both of them and don't limit yourself to one website on anything because that sounds like like wrong I say but uh I think we all catch diversify where you're buying from right right and this situation could actually benefit eBay where if you do want to find stuff that's used refurbished discontinued you might be able to find a lot more Apple products from these smaller sellers through eBay because it's not like these products are gonna disappear they've got to get sold somewhere so eBay is obviously in a good position to potentially try to grab more of that market a lot of these merchants already sell on both but it's possible they'll grab more of the business here's one from Hunter would Google ever want to get into the vendor game they have so many products plus the money to get into something like that would be a large incentive what do you guys think I mean they are they they they sell their phones like directly off their website they have Google Express which they've partnered with like Costco and all these other retailers for I mean it's not as expansive of them as Amazon's is but fairly close yeah they are like I think there were talks of them opening their own store somewhere in New York - interesting yeah I'm trying they're trying to like get their feet wet in e-commerce I would probably say one of the few that's really trying to give Amazon a run for their money right now is Walmart and they're throwing a lot of money at it but we'll see how long-term they are committed to it and also they make most of their money off of their stores so a lot of times these traditional retailers they kind of like have this epiphany years later and they're like why are we trying to like fight tooth and nail on online commerce we're making less profit and online commerce whereas like our stores are doing really well I mean like anybody that's read the innovators dilemma knows that that's a situation that comes up all the time but Walmart at least for now seems to be very committed to try to catch up to Amazon and so far they are capturing more ecommerce dollars in the US uh before we move on did you guys by any chance and I never thought I'd actually speak these words on a broadcast but did you catch SNL this weekend I saw the Amazon thing yeah oh my god that was wonderful I just wanted to bring that up if anybody hasn't seen it Saturday Night Live took a real nice swipe at Bezos this weekend I thought was a pretty clever a clever duck on their part it's it's worth the watch I think I like that take because obviously a lot of the other takes were specifically like I've read a lot of stories about hey these incentives are too rich and like Amazon sucks because they took the money that was on the table that everybody knows was gonna be available to them but the SNL take was a lot funnier where it just kind of was Bezos trying to troll Trump with to headquarters so yeah definitely watch that it's not that long either it was pretty clever and it did kind of prove the point that the headquarters probably could have benefited from some better locations but we won't go down that road right now we got to talk about smash brothers coming to a VR platform that's gonna happen Alfred no definitely not I mean it might if you're late if Nintendo decides to go that route but like considering that it's locked as a Nintendo property and I have not seen any signs of Nintendo trying to go vr because they already have a lot of stuff like motion control stuff with it already and nobody plays with motion control competitively like you can you can probably play with like the joy Kahn's and like you know swiping up and whatever I doubt that anyone in tournament play would do that and I think that's the closest that you'll get to having a VR like experience but you're not gonna have like a headset or anything like that any time soon yeah it might come sometime in the future yeah yeah what would you want to see out of future smash installments Alfred with your with your take away so far on ultimate what do you think smash needs to do next to keep things fresh and easy question I think an online play like they've done a lot to improve the online system but I think that an online system similar to what they did with Dragon Ball Fighter Z or Street Fighter 4 5 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is probably the biggest thing on my wish list so right now Nintendo they obviously we're like pretty late to the game as far as like online play goes but they're still using friend codes which is extremely frustrating to the point where fans have to set up their own kind of online system there there's one called like anthers ladder where you're it's ranked based on the honor system so you play and you like you like mark like if you won the match or not and then like you ridiculous yeah you move up the ladder that way until like you're matched up against people that are at your level because right now the way that I've been playing it you just matched up of random people all the time unless you know good people and then so one way is your match up with random people and then like you never know what you're gonna get also like connection wise like you don't know if they're like playing on a really laggy connection or anything like that and it's just generally frustrating if you know people that are really good then you kind of like have to do this like off off the record not off the record but like it's not on the platform like there's no voice chat or anything like that so you have to like reach out to them say hey do you want to play blah blah blah like here's my friend code and then once you've added them as friends you don't have to keep sending the friend code it's just annoying you know like it could definitely make that a lot easier like Pokemon was able to figure that out with like its online gameplay and I wish that Smash had the same thing so with this one they are doing something like that there's like global rankings now and that if you're good enough you get in like some kind of like a higher tier level where you only play against other people that have also reached that tier but I haven't seen much of that like they didn't let you do online play during the four-hour demos that we did but that would be my biggest thing like having the online play be much more competitive I literally thought you were just gonna say why Luigi don't care about okay other people seem to but yeah that was the most well thought out response I think you've ever given on the show Alfred just putting that out there before I I completely spaced on this but big welcome back to APEC we haven't seen you in the chat in a while and I totally spaced on this when I noticed you throw-in comments down but it's great to have you back hope you're on the mend and it's great to have everybody along we are out of time for the day and because of the Thanksgiving holiday 3:59 will be taking a brief hiatus we will be back tomorrow with special guest right then yes yeah it looks like I'm gonna line up David Katz Meyer so send in hypetrain I didn't know your TV related questions and Entertainment System related questions it seems like a good time to talk to David just ahead of like I don't know the holiday shopping or G that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday so and then we'll be back on Monday right Bryan yeah so we're gonna take Wednesday off obviously Thursday Friday off and then yeah we'll be back on Monday what what day of the week is that I remember what date is that I don't know that's a day Monday the 26 will be resuming regular schedule so yeah you got a we got a short week this week but hopefully you can bear with us yeah and enjoy turkey day if we don't see you tomorrow oh is it time to go yeah it's time to go know it's time to go alright the 359 is available on iTunes TuneIn stitcher feedburner google play music google podcast who's high-neck oh and of course cnet.com thanks everybody for watching welcome back a pack we'll see you tomorrow all right Alexa played Esposito goodnight you you