Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 I'm Ben Fox Ruben and I'm alfred Aang uber wants to make flying cars a reality our colleague Clare Riley traveled to Tokyo to cover an uber conference that's focused on the ride hailing company's skyward ambitions uber plans to start trials in three pilot cities as soon as 2023 and already has designs for its air taxis Alfred how realistic do you think any of this is I get it pilot cities haha I mean I think the technology is probably there for it I think there's gonna probably be a lot of you know issues that come with it as it starts and I think you have a much less room for errors when it comes to flying cars I mean like take a look at the you know Technica the technology ubers testing out on us roads with like self-driving cars you would know what happened with that one fatal accident in Arizona I believe you're right about that yeah and then you know you kind of take a look at it from the perspective perspective of flying cars now where you know I think there's a lot more dangers that come with that and I think that's why I think it'll be a while before it comes to the u.s. so they've talked about this before where they want to do it in countries where governments are much more likely to be willing to work with them and also govern more lacs yeah not lakhs but more so that like they don't have all this like bureaucratic red tape to go through where it's kind of like dictatorship countries where they can kind of just say what do you want to do this and we'll do it yeah an interesting element that I saw from this related to the autonomous vehicles on the ground were that they eventually want to make these autonomous flying cars they eventually want to make them autonomous as well by 2030 so I guess that would make them a little bit safer potentially or at least they'd make them cost a lot less if you don't have pilots for every single one of them so you know kind of kind of hard to tell I'm not really sure what I feel about this so I'm gonna put it in the same file as Elon Musk creating a moon base and Amazon's delivery drones I'm not really sure that's a big file of big promises from tech companies that like we're not really sure like where this is going but it sounds cool yeah it's fun to write about that's for sure next up instagrams founders are heading out the door instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and chief financial officer Mike Krieger will be leaving in the coming weeks the departure comes and it seemingly as another seemingly bad piece of news for instagrams owner Facebook which is having a really rough year now they didn't specifically say why they were leaving the company but this comes after Yann Combe who was the founder of whatsapp also decided to leave Facebook this year that was back in April so I don't know what do you think about this one there was a report in The Washington Post today that basically mentioned that they had issues with Mark Zuckerberg which was also the same reason why whatsapp founder left and for keeping score here I also clearly remember Facebook's legal officer leaving I believe in August and that's coming after another so you know these are several big rounds of executives leaving Facebook and this is a company that you know they could have been making millions at and for them to choose to leave there they also met the instrument founders mentioned that they want to you know channel their creative energy more are they gonna make the next Instagram or something like that it's hard to tell but I mean it definitely is a badge line for Facebook when you know all these all this talent is choosing to get out of the company yeah absolutely last tech analyst ming chi quo reported that sales of the iPhone 10's max I actually got that right is far outselling the smaller 10s this makes a lot of sense to me because if anybody's gonna buy like a cheaper new iPhone I feel like they would get the 10r instead so if you're gonna go and buy one immediately you probably want to get the maxilla and if you already have a 10 it's kind of just why would I get the 10s when there's not that many differences but in 10s max you know I have much more reason to get that if I already own a 10 yeah so according to this analysts it's actually it's it's basically like for every three or four cell sales of the max that's like one sale of the 10s so it's doing a lot better anyway if you want to read more about these stories check us out on CNN I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm malphur ding thanks for listening all right thanks everybody for stopping by and joining us for the recording of the audio podcast which you can subscribe to using the links below now we want to take your questions in comments to keep the conversation going first and foremost James bless you many people are scared of flying in normal planes I'm not sure flying cars are going to take off zing I don't get it that's the other thing that we didn't mention on the podcast by the way was the whole issue with infrastructure uber has said that they were gonna spend something like I don't know a hundred million dollars or a hundred million dollars a year to create these sky ports which are basically you know is the same thing of as a heliport where you you get up and you take off and you land for these flying cars but I think that the infrastructure as Claire mentions in her story is gonna be much more extensive than that and ultimately it's gonna it's gonna take a lot of time to try to figure out how you're gonna fit all these additional vehicles into the sky they're supposed to fly somewhere between a thousand and two thousand feet in the air if I remember correctly I mean that's that's always been something really interesting that I I feel was never addressed in any like futuristic movies that have flying cars they just like you really think that there would be no such thing as traffic if like flying cars existed like Futurama was probably the best at like show it being realistic about it yeah I'm sorry the problem with the Fifth Element was that that was probably the most dangerous situation you could ever consider with flying cars I mean like Bruce Willis made it look really cool and interesting but he was flying in between buildings going up and down that's that's like yeah dangerous for most people and then what happens if it's like a police chase or something like that with flying cars then what I don't know it sounds like an awesome movie but I very my point like that there's a lot of like boring like issues that come with flying cars I I think when people like to think of flying cars like yeah go anywhere and then you'd like don't really think about you know all the regulations that would like be in place like traffic laws and things like that is oh cool way to take something really cool and make it sound like really drab so yeah that's my job here at sea nice going going in that direction - so apparently these cars are supposed to be battery charged so they could travel up to 60 miles on a single charge and then they would get like you know you could you could rapidly increase the battery charge in as little as eight minutes or something but it's still it's another one of those issues where it's it's probably gonna be really expensive initially and it could only go 60 miles I don't know why they have to be cars why don't we have flying scooters like like bird the bird scooters you could make a flying bird yeah maybe I don't even just like rent them and like dock them and stuff even one like the roof of a building because they have giant wings like a Pegasus at least then I would kind of get it and think the wings are overrated okay okay we'll think of something maybe a bunch of birds will fly it around I don't know ready for some more questions I think so - says I hope flying cars are autonomous people can't drive in two dimensions could you imagine people driving in three expanding on that Mike Shaw is asking what the flying cars be able to talk to each other with 5g and even further down in the chat Alex Mitchell's standing it's more likely that when this all comes fruition we're gonna be on to 6g and beyond yeah probably I mean having the cars talk to each other this is completely hypothetical but making sure that the cars could actually talk to each other especially if they're autonomous makes a lot of sense and that's probably how they would actually do it and make sure that it would be safer that's the same idea with autonomous vehicles on the road as well where if the cars are not only autonomous but have some amount of awareness around them they could significantly reduce the number of accidents because they would know what other cars were not only in front of them behind them but also around the corner across the city so you would have to do something similar to that with flying cars yeah that's really the only way I would see flying cars working out in a safe way just in the sense like if if people are try are driving their own flying cars it's like there there's gonna be a lot of accidents and to me it seems like this is initially gonna be like a cheaper version of having like a private helicopter yeah that's how they're gonna start it and if they have any plans on making the a mass-market thing they would have to make them autonomous that's where they're hoping to save money the initial cost of uber air they say at lunch would be $6 per passenger mile traveled so $6 a mile $6 a mile that's kind of crazy I mean how much is a taxi cab in New York definitely not six definitely not dial I like it's somewhere between $1 to it's like two to three dollars so yeah that so more than double but hey you get to tell your friends that you showed up at the party and from a flying car I can tell my friends that anyway what are they gonna do go outside and look for the flying car like that's your friends are much more gullible than my friends but yeah that's that's a good ok but even if you did even if you did show up in a flying car and you told your friends that they still wouldn't believe you if your friends aren't gullible they wouldn't believe you it like you're right anyway more questions sir enjoy what are the rules for public airspace usage that's a complicated one I don't know how well that we can dive into that they're working on that same issue with drones too they're hoping to get like different bands of public airspace where they would utilize drones that's the area that I know about specifically because I cover Amazon so I feel like the band between a thousand and two thousand feet in the air they would hope to create that to allow for air taxis or flying cars so my assumption is is that they would have to create new regulations to make sure that that area would be workable but again this is all caveat on the fact that like none of this exists and this is gonna take a really long time for them to air this out so air it out nice thank you Wow I'm totally not doing any of these on purpose but my puns are really taken off so thank you I mean it's not like we had Highlands about flying cars for decades I mean this isn't a new idea but I'm excuse me plan to actualize it it's just like for some reason anytime something cool in a cartoon or a movie happens in real life it just doesn't seem as cool anymore like when when like Scott watch's came when smartwatches came out like all the commercials for them were basically you'll remember when Dick Tracy had like he could talk into his watch and then remember you know like the Power Rangers had they're like watching and things like that check it out now Samsung we've got our own SmartWatch and then it's just like this isn't cool anymore like this it's like when your mom joined Facebook yeah I agree with you though in that I mean like if I got an Apple watch and my friends got Apple watches like we couldn't create Voltron and that's really a no very uncool yeah it's super super sucky but if you got the flying cars made your step closer then look it's real min the flying car with your watch and then yeah crash them into each other like a giant robot more questions James asked if this is gonna have any kind of impact on Airlines would cheap flight Airlines be affected by this kind of an implementation great question probably not because these would be much shorter like in city fly yes I mean we haven't figured out fuel efficiency and they're talking about six bucks a mile do you think you're gonna take this to the next county or state override yeah I imagine it'd be really expensive I feel like it to be comparing the differences it's between like having your own car versus taking a bus mmhmm yeah yeah it's like I think Airlines would still be the cheaper and probably safer option well for now they're only talking about 60 miles on a single charge so you're not gonna take a flying car Norwood I think that it would make any logical sense to like go from New York to LA in a flying car it wouldn't it wouldn't work that way I don't I don't believe so there's the they would be in cities and maybe the farthest you would go is like to go from the city to visit your nice grass I will say it is a very it's a much nicer alternative to taking the subway if we're available in New York mm-hmm because the subway infrastructure is all like messed up so either they can spend millions of dollars trying to ears trying to fix that or just you know do away with them and have those cuddles new thing yeah just have those tunnels be empty where the the mold people can live mmm one interesting thing the Claire story references is that they've done studies about ride-hailing companies like uber and lyft and they found that at this point the ride hailing companies are just clogging up the roads a lot more so the idea of alleviating some of the space and helping them continue to grow that's a big reason to create something like uber air because a lot of the times these ride-hailing you know the folks that are working for uber or working for a lyft are just driving around waiting for their next ride and they can levitate instead yeah or they could just be like sitting on top of skyscrapers so they're not clogging the roads you know those parking lots in the city that like are kind of stacked on top of each other mm-hmm they don't need the those are parking garages no no they have like outside oh right yeah no no I know yeah buildings where they essentially lift the cars okay now I'm following you they don't need those in order they can just fly it right into that instead I'm like as we're talking about this I'm like progressively being like okay this is not gonna happen yeah probably in my lifetime but these are fun questions to answer so keep them coming can you imagine driver's ed like what self-respecting teacher out there which sign up for this I say let's put a teenager behind the wheel of one of these no there they would be a minister these are gonna be pilots up until the point that they make them autonomous so the problem is is that making them autonomous like did somebody mention the point that like the like I'm afraid of like regular flying then like if you're in an autonomous vehicle or an autonomous flying car one of them is gonna crash eventually yeah that does actually happen who knows how that's actually gonna impact the market and if people are gonna be concerned and say like I don't want to do this anymore yeah I'm also very curious what the potential for like terrorist attacks with like flying cars would be okay great yeah now this just got super dark I totally you're absolutely right though that was a question in the chat yeah that's I mean it's like legit arson man it's a totally legitimate point and it's something that would be happening in very dense areas like cities so making them autonomous could also potentially help with that but at the same time for you being a cybersecurity reporter you probably know that any system could get hacked so and we've seen like some early signs of that with autonomous vehicles on the ground yeah I'm very curious like what the security going into these cars as far as like that the pilot programs go is but yeah you know I'm not going to one of these 23 cities that they're testing it out and I know none of them are gonna be in the u.s. no no that's where you're wrong hold on three pilot cities Los Angeles Dallas in the United States and then a third international city that they haven't announced no I am wrong but I will be staying put yeah I'm very curious about how they got like the not permits but like you know just got like the okay to do that in those cities those it really condensed like cities are they actually going over like highways and roads or send out an airfield kind of area I I would probably think the latter more sense I would I would probably think that these are happening and at airports or something like that so yeah James is asking if we know how they're powered it's gonna be Jets or fans and they're gonna like blow over stuff in the street and knock over fences so they're apparently supposed to be way quieter than helicopters I'm gonna read this from Claire story Uber's design has four sets of twin rotors that it uses for vertical lift and a single rotor for forward propulsion its cruise speed is 150 to 200 miles per hour in an altitude I mentioned this earlier of 1,000 to 2,000 feet and could travel 60 miles on a single charge so it would be battery charged but that so hopefully that answers the question they do have design because dash is asking about fuel efficiency and that's that's not bad really when you think about it to send a flying car sixty miles on a single charge it's really not bad if it's in gate if it's in the city sure yeah I I know but it's still very preliminary like if they actually do these trials by 2023 I'll be pretty impressed and you know hopefully we send somebody from seeing it out to Dallas to check them out well until then we can all just dream along with sir enjoy about the Intel volley copter oh yeah yeah another company called Kitty Hawk I think Larry Page yeah Larry Page is backing that one they're also creating they're developing one there are a couple companies working on these yeah so Kitty Hawk is being tested out in Las Vegas actually got an offer to try it out but I don't want to go to Las Vegas so I'm just gonna wait until it's you know more accessible but yeah it Larry Page is you know funding that startup and it is based not based but like they're flying it out like in Nevada yeah yeah and meanwhile there are a lot of trials that are going on far away from population centers in the United States for delivery drones and different types of drones as well Amazon is working on a pilot delivery drone project in the UK right now with like a handful of people so that's another one to look at but all of these are now being like very tightly regulated and controlled so it's gonna take a while if any of this stuff hits the mainstream and even when the technology finally does come to be true it will be a regulatory nightmare alright let's move on the Facebook sir enjoy ask do you think Facebook will now pull Instagram strings hard enough to affect it as a social media platform I just remembered slack acquiring and killing Astro mail recently while typing this I I think Facebook has had a really tough go this year and then really rocking the boat at Instagram to me feels like a really bad idea and that's a great way to instill a lot of fear and uncertainty for the people that decided to stick around after the founders left so if you're definitely trying to get a bunch of people it'll like walk out the door really quickly I feel like yeah do that make a lot of changes really quickly but at the same time like Instagram is like one of the primary gems of Facebook and they are probably the way they Facebook thinks they're probably gonna try to like take more advertising money out of them yeah I would argue that Instagram is likely Facebook's future here in the sense that you know younger folks are leaving Facebook and you know but then they'll be like Oh Instagram is still fine though like there's all these issues with Facebook that you know for some reason hasn't really hit Instagram yet and there it's bet easier for younger people to go there you know Instagram stories is pretty popular now among like teens and you know younger folks whereas you know Facebook really isn't that popping anymore mm-hmm so for them to like for that for the Instagram founders I mean to kind of leave like makes me think or like suggest that Facebook is trying to have more of an influence on Instagram and that they might not be that into that yeah it's the same thing with the whatsapp founder I think but that's what happens when you acquire a company everything is like hunky-dory to begin with and they say oh we're gonna let you remain independent but Facebook is a business they've also like their stock has struggled a lot this year so and they very carefully kept adding more and more ads into Instagram and I think the expectation is is that especially with the founders leaving now Mark Zuckerberg can kind of have his way and add even more advertising into Instagram so I would say expect that but as far as like big wholesale changes to features I think that if they are gonna do that they are gonna roll that out a little bit more slowly just to not scare the troops can I just point out that the generation divide came to be very prominent in this last bit of conversation where as what Alfred described as poppin been equated to hunky dory yeah I am 52 years old so hunky dory I'm 51 yeah just a couple more questions before we say goodbye Scott Maya do you think this is the slow decline of Facebook and do we think it's gonna go the way of MySpace no no I mean like MySpace I think it was a much different like Beast it's it's I don't think it's fair to make comparisons between Facebook and MySpace you know MySpace really hasn't hat like the dominance that Facebook has had for such a long time like considering like if Facebook were a country like they would have more people than like the US they would have more people than India and China put together yeah that's a better I didn't know if it would be more than China it's just cuz I'd be more than China okay I didn't I forgot about the cool I'm 52 years old but I'm a little older than you you turn from 51 52 yeah yeah like comparing those two is like completely different like Facebook has had this whole strategy of we're going to be everything that you want to go on like that's why they have like Facebook live that's why they have like the they bought oculus that's why they bought Instagram that's why they bought whatsapp it's it's myspace was very different in the sense of like we just want to be like this one thing like you connected your friends here and you post chain mails for your friends to share to five people and the love of their life will kiss them tomorrow boy they what not hold on to that mo for very long but like Facebook it's kind of like they want to be everything in the same way that like Walmart doesn't just sell one thing it's like they're they want it to be like the everything store or whatever there's that what Amazon calls themselves that's that's what's Amazon's been called but yeah yeah so they're the everything social network yeah that's kind of what Facebook wants to do I mean like there's a reason why they try it where they bid for the rights to air what what was it Thursday Night Football was it did Facebook Facebook was a part of that yeah they didn't win it twitter twitter actually had it on it yeah gotcha yeah like they're they're really trying to make it like this is where you go for everything and Google has done the same thing so I think that's why it's a little bit different from Facebook's perspective now will it be the downfall of just facebook.com I don't think it's possible I don't think it'll go away but I do think that there are like a lot of younger people that are basically not really seeing a need or a use for Facebook anymore or like things are really but then it's kind of like so I don't use Facebook anymore but I still use Facebook messenger which is a part that's my point though like they're like setting up everything so that everyone is on it and even if I'm not using fake even I'm not posting on somebody's wall or like wishing somebody happy birthday or going to events on Facebook I'm still using messenger to keep in touch with people I'm still using like Instagram to upload a photo or something like that so you can cut off one tentacle on like Facebook's like Empire here but like three years will grow back I'm not growing back but you're still using like many of its other ones yeah and when you look at it when you look at it from a competitive side nobody is anywhere close to facebook i'm thinking about snapchat twitter and to a much smaller extent google+ there were a lot of expectations that google was gonna dive in social so it is still a thing and google has an enormous amount of resources but they never really saw the movement yet obviously they were hoping to get from that at many congressional hearings Facebook will always be asked you know do you consider Facebook of monopoly they've asked us to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and college stretch and they always mentioned basically well you know there the average person uses like 8 apps on on their phone and Facebook is just one of them but like if you really take a look at the numbers it's like ok the average person uses 8 apps but it's like Facebook is one of them Instagram is one of them whatsapp is one of them Facebook Messenger is one of them I there's probably a fifth one too but it's just like ok cool like you're really gonna try to hide your hand here and say like yeah Facebook is only one of those 8 apps except we owned like a majority of the other ones as well well correct me if I'm wrong here too is that usually when they're asked that question they try to broaden it out as much as possible and they say well if you're gonna look at this from a social media perspective obviously we're dominant but if you look at it broadly from a digital media yeah or just like a user consumption perspective we have to compete with television and radio and all the other internet sites that you go on serve to me though in the sense of yeah like they're saying you know we're big in social media but we're not big in like the Internet which is really funny to me because anytime like you wouldn't ask an oil company that like are you a monopoly I was like well we have to compete with all of business like that's not compete with the guy that tells you it's like we have to compete with Nike come on guys this is like that's not like it's such a weird comparison for me Amazon does the same art yeah you know where they say like you know from from an international perspective Amazon is less than 1% I think of international retail so but they also they don't sell they don't know Big Oil they don't know gas stations and also by jazz yeah you can't buy gasoline on amazon.com come on Bezos I got I got it I got my fuel from Amazon Prime it came to me in two days oh that's that's pretty awesome yeah you ran out of gas the day earlier prime mobile with prime juice alright we're just about out of time real quick on the iPhone Mike Shaw says the iPhone 10s and 10's Mac's have been so inspiring to him they inspired him to get the Samsung Note 9 got'em fever says and I think this is the the most culminating statement about the entire development here today the iPhone 10s max is the one with the biggest change if you're going to actually get an upgrade you might as well go all the way through why would you just get a phone that is almost a carbon copy the one you already yeah exactly except for the price yes yeah I agree with that argument but like from the pricing in your town already throwing money away yeah so the 10s isn't like kind of this weird middle child like mode where you know like if I'm going to get a new phone and what I want to get the one that has a larger screen way oh there's a whole thing with like the the 10s max and like the are like being the same size or something everyone ok so the R is six point one inches and the max is six point five inches and the 10s is smaller yeah I think it's five point eight inches but it's somebody in the chat correct me on it it's stuck in this weird phase where if I'm like going to buy phone why would I get this normal one that's the same thing as a ten and even arguably the same thing as the ten are and slightly smaller than the time I don't pay more money for it when I can get like the 10s max or the ten are just for essentially the the same thing for $250 less it's it's very weird like phase right now I don't really understand why it's there yeah which Apple kind of showed showed you their cards a little bit by sun setting of the Tenten because they were like the ten so damn similar to the 10s that if we kept it around people would just buy the ten if we could cut the price on the ten by a hundred bucks then why would anybody bother buying the 10s it doesn't have any cool new features like an emoji or whatever yeah yeah yeah I feel like we're gonna have the Soylent revelation where it's like the ten s is the ten right it's people yes I don't think Alfred gets a reference no he doesn't he's just the one I just didn't see the problem with that like eat people it's fine that might be the most Millennial thing you said and that's saying a lot yeah those are killing people that's not cool that's the next market that the Millennials will kill humans all right we are out of time we gotta get going thanks everybody for joining us we'll be back tomorrow to talk about something else innate or inane or I don't know what terminology I really want to use in a situation but go ahead and send us out more about flying cars which am I looking at this one there's no prompt that one you got a young man this one I got a I got a work on me 3:59 podcast is available on cnet.com that's the only that's it's the only one to check out but you could also check it out on iTunes tuna and stitcher feedburner Google Play Music and the Amazon echo anyway thanks everybody for your questions really appreciate it and we'll see you again tomorrow you you