Gadgetory

apples home pod might be a dud while the US government probes the battery throttling controversy LG settles the G for boot looping class-action lawsuit and let's dig into the future of 5g we've got a lot to talk about so make sure you're charged and ready for episode two nine zero of the PocketNow weekly recorded february 2nd at noon pacific or close to noon pacific this weekly podcast is where we dissect and discuss those gadgets that make our lives mobile smartphones tablets and wearables it's all the stuff you wished existed when you were a kid and boot loops would have been the name of a terrible off-brand kid cereal you know came in the bag not in the box with the car love colorful graphics on it I'm Juan Carlos back now senior editor pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. Jules Wilin out on the east coast how's it going buddy boy you know I've always been more of an oatmeal square kind of person like Quaker has this good vision to the life like they have they have the like little puffs things and in like the store brands have them they never really compare ourselves yeah it's it's funny like there are a lot of see generics have gotten really good now though but when we were younger if you if you got like the bag o cereal it's just like Lucky Charms and you're like no no say that we've gotten to like 75 or 80 percent of the enjoyment so I mean if you really want to see like real off brand on brand comparisons you should check out the cheap show podcast available where other fine podcasts are available we were literally at their podcast this week but it's not right we're sending a thrown out of bone to a completely unrelated show so totally not as I wasn't expecting the whole intro thing so I was like yeah that sounds like a good thing to get into so I think you should take that on our recommendation no we actually have some cool tech news to talk about this week I just kind of kind of get in the pre the house and order our pre-show all set before we start getting into the harvest season of rumors and news articles and releases that are gonna be coming out around MWC time it's hilarious you start thinking like well the show is gonna take place at the end of February but February is a month that flies by so we're already starting to sift through news coming out of what might be going down and and we'll also be going hands-on with a couple things on the channel - some more after the buzz videos we're gonna be catching up on those we just did the galaxy s 8 plus I'm gonna be spending some more time with the BlackBerry key1 while they might be moving forward with some of their unlocked phones in the United States as since they couldn't get a carrier deal they're still looking for US distribution on some of their flag ships and we still want to hear from you we will be putting together another listeners take the wheel or mailbag episode soon so make sure you're sending us those comments and questions and and Jules if someone wanted to join the conversation right now how might they participate with this actual live broadcast of the show this this cluster of a podcast that goes to air 15 minutes late and no one's actually number of people are actually watching we have a show running right now through nothing but perseverance I have to apologize like my setup super raw right now my desktop is still out of commission I'm trying to fix up a few things and clean out some of the casing and I thought I was gonna be able to get it done yesterday so I'm running this for my last shirt really give a shout-out to my for a newfound friend and colleague Rhine Hagar from Android police he was let me this space over here for you to use and the gigabit internet that apparently he has I feel like flipping jellies that is so not fair I mean like we're still like I know we're probably around five years away in Los Angeles from holding town hall meetings about the potential of examining the economic impact of a potential bid in Southern California to consider the future viability of Fiverr first-round Commission report and then a viability competition and then you have to assess the big that economic impact and then like what will it mean for people who own really nice homes because they won't want you know their homes disturbed by this if you want to join this show a hash okay yeah weakly not Twitter if you want to if you want to get in and insert your own comments about the internet about a lot stuff like that because internet 5g is gonna be a big topic in our second segment of this broadcast so we really want to get you you know that as well as the rest of the news by the way you can actually access the rundown and see what we're actually talking about by clicking the link in the description on the YouTube channel and pocketnow.com hello we run that site it's it's a place we run that sigh yo let's jump into some some hot news the the top stories that we get to talk about this week as cultivated by the writers on pocket now yeah and I'm one of those writers so but so let's just go through them for the week of what was a January 30th this is all the news that is fit to podcast apparently home pod demand for the smart speaker from Apple Apple's first is not stacking up to the usual standards that we have seen whereas iPhones have sold out in minutes from launch time we've seen the original sales date of February 9 still tacked on to pre-orders made after the weekend of its launch it watched last Friday so and it still has not yet to do anything except be available at places as opposed to selling out so that's interesting we'll get into that Apple is potentially a little stressed out too perhaps because with the iPhone se 2 there may be evidence as KGI securities claims that there isn't enough resource and development to be able to put out an iPhone se sequel the favorite mid Ranger of hot color spec knows of 2016 may not get a follow on at least for this year US government agencies are looking into Apple's behavior in terms of throttling certain iPhones older iPhones in the case that they are protecting the battery from overcharging or from over exerting itself in causing shutdowns but this behavior was not disclosed properly it took them months to do that so the SEC the Security and Exchange Commission as well as the Department of Justice are looking into that behavior right now LG has actually when it actually went to arbitration it was initially reported from the law firm Geron kids LLP representing a class action against LG on bootloop issues that weren't properly supported that's they would get rebates free funds cash and credit you know and now it appears that it's it was either inaccurate or it was too early of a report because all that the class is getting now through arbitration is extended warranties will dig into that in just a bit as well 10 gigabytes of RAM who needs 10 gigabytes of RAM who needs 512 gigabytes of storage on their Android smartphones apparently that's in the cards for a Chinese manufacturer vivo they were the ones that introduced the first phone with under display fingerprint sensor from synaptics and now thanks to slides leaked out to Weibo presentation slides we see that 10 gigabytes of RAM is in the cards for the x-play 7x play being the flagship series for vive right there so we're going to look at that in a bit Strava one of the big compilation the services for fitness tracking for data for geocaching that fitness tracking data is getting a good look at looking at from military bases because a lot of military personnel who do their workouts they have been apparently tracked there are patrol paths have also been tracked and all this data is public is available and it took college kid just a few minutes to figure this out so it's an interesting InfoSec failure it is in a sense is a fun find their failure yeah yeah it's it's a failure of epic proportions but want to start off with the huawei P 20 apparently there's going to be an event in Paris I'm mark invite me to like the Parisian events what's going on there super cool I mean like I have a good time in Germany I get along with with the Germans they're fun I think they're super fun people um but you know and just it's either that or San Francisco and I just say if there's other things going on we could go to service I don't I don't recall them going to Paris for any certain events yeah well and actually I think this year they might be looking at swapping out so instead of doing a you know that that sort of German home-based launch which i i've never was completely i never completely under completely understood why kwame picked germany as my strongest consumer basis in addition to the UK which they sometimes do for honor events as well but the trains so maybe that maybe the conventional wisdom is like if you if you show Paris a little love can you crack more into that sort of like you know Iberian Peninsula market make a little bit more headway in Spain and Portugal too because they're I mean they have shown strengths in the top EU countries but it's not you know well distributed there's again stronger than other places stronger these ways is the tender places so you know it's interesting to see three cameras we've been talking about this for a while and it seems like we we had a little debate about the name whether it was going to be in the p11 p12 well excuse me that could the p12 was supposed to be they may treat mark these names like years in advance just thinking that they can just go down the line and it appeared that this name the p11 was in more offices was at more offices than the p20 name but turns out that well at least Evan bless says that the p20 name will stick around and his word is bond yeah I'll be crazy to see we definitely we've been getting numerous questions especially from huawei fan and friend of the show Andrew Wallace at fat produce who I think he's rockin a mate nine really hoped the p10 and I think he means the p20 introduces the standard monochrome and color sensor set up along with an ultra wide third camera that precedent would be great to have as an industry standard going forward I wonder if if we're talking about a triple camera arrangement on the back if they will play with any kind of focal length changes I'd be curious if we're talking about three cameras working together a wide-angle camera can't really contribute to that setup as well as zoom can because of you start changing the focal lengths yeah you have you deal with varying degrees of distortion so I think if one of them is gonna be some some form of zoom it'll probably be a zoom in not an ultra wide but I'll be curious to see because we keep throwing around this like 40 megapixel output you know like buzz and I I would really hope that maybe if you have three matched sensors three matched focal length sensors you become more of like a light row style camera in how you acquire light and how you can play with depth effects maybe some of that information can feed into things like augmented reality and you can have like sort of a smarter post-processing setup on the phone since that's kind of where everyone's going to anyway it's less about putting on the biggest possible camera sensor and more about how can you manipulate the data once the raw image has been captured well it's about the raw data and stuff that you capture and how you can creatively trick the hardware and so that if you know you have all this data and you can use the more data that you have the more you can manipulate it is what I'm saying here we're not on the courts with the PN weekly hashtag on Twitter well they have the power trip with like a intuitive so I think this was the logic behind Germany fair point oh that's right soon I forget about that yeah yeah yeah and with German companies so that makes sense David bad piece of this Silva says Americans should take advantage of their easy - well that that's LG we'll get to that later all these tweets here Peter Peter hating aw so just just sort of confirming that idea that Leica is also a German company and that makes sense for them to be launching like a products and partnership that's another thing that I I we could also potentially consider is for like--is benefit would that would a foam platform be a way for a traditional camera company to experiment with future iterations of photography and so is like a does like a stand to benefit from this type of an arrangement for when they start releasing standalone products if Leica wanted to get into the light row space and make their own l16 style camera then I think the data they could glean from a smartphone experiment with a you know a triple sensor could be very helpful in moving forward on future products and services I don't know I mean like that's actually kind of a I thought just kind of popped in my head that's kind of an interesting idea if this is a truly symbiotic relationship and that information can flow freely both ways then Huawei might be enabling sort of a new generation of point-and-shoot cameras in an in a really smart fashion well I guess we'll have to see I mean we are about that's like three and a half weeks out of em WC so and trying to be one of the manufacturers to get themselves away from the noise but you think well there isn't much noise this year right because LG is gonna be after the show and it's really just going to be the Samsung so that's actually is it isn't that the big fear where last year we had you know some really great announcements happening at MWC because we knew Samsung was gonna be doing its own thing Samsung sort of leveraging MWC for themselves wouldn't you want to get out of the Samsung vortex and excuse me do your own sort of press conference I mean I think Huawei can survive doing their own press conference I don't think they necessarily need the reporter base of bloggers and journalists that are all going to be in one place at one time for MWC that they can they can do their own announcements and still find reasonable traction on getting the news out there the thought of mind is you know at one point let's get out in front of them maybe that will help now we should wait afterwards or somehow let this is this vortex of attention as you put it is is just not good for the companies that would come otherwise around that line so yeah it's an opportunity if they can do something really cool with the p20 so you get out after Samsung and then just before you can you can if you can get in that window in between when Samsung announces and when Samsung is really shipping product in earnest and then do something a little disruptive like saying oh yeah Samsung they finally stapled two cameras onto the back of the Galaxy S 9 plus but on our p20 we've got three camera instead of the megapixel war we've got the camera sensor how granular Huawei wants to market their device because so far so vague you mentioned something about the vortex of attention or something or like the maps of the world and what I've tried this is so ungraceful of a segue to stream but we'll take it anyways the header image that we're using is it's not that definitive because of course it's you know when you pull out to a whole view of Europe or whoever the on a continent skill you really don't see individual paths but apparently this person I tried to have strong Australian student was looking at this Nick waters no he's an X well that was let's take Nick waters a comment here because he's an X infantry officer and he perhaps best described the situation as a big op second per sec fail operational security and personal security and if you where and this this is this came across the u.s. in Russia and like every a lot in 20 of a the infantry just you know who happens to be taking care of their fitness and likes to do so in a more technical manner will be wearing a Fitbit or whatever and you know they might be wearing their Fitbit on their patrols and when you see this when you see this data trove well good luck to those who want to breach that breach where were that bases well yeah but I mean it's it's also I think we're gonna see continued clashes there was a really high up voted story on reddit again another editorial talking about all of these tech companies that monitor every waking moment of our lives through mobile devices and smart speakers and and like it's we're kind of running into a decision point we're running into a pain point where we need to decide what the future of commerce of advertising personal data tracking storage all of these things are going to be coming to a head in a way that could be very upsetting to the current market that we have again huge opportunities for other players to jump in but this is like another data point in this vast sea of who do we trust with our data who do we trust with our movement who do we trust with very personal and granular information I mean things we just take for granted how much I love having all day heart tracking information on my SmartWatch yet that still has to live in a big cloud bucket on someone else's server and it can only be as safe as however you know safer safeguarded that server be so there's a lot of trust there's a lot of faith that these companies are gonna be acting the best interests of their comes customers because that's what the market would dictate that's what you know capitalism would dictate if they do a poor job of it then I'll move on to another solution but we're also at a time where consumers have never been more entrenched if Apple suddenly failed and violated the privacy of a huge swath of their customers I would be curious to see how many of them would actually use that as the justification for leaving the platform and how many would stay ditto Samsung ditto any other major corporation in the space ditto Amazon if there was a sudden Amazon breach how many people would be like oh I'm totally mad I'm never shopping with them again until tomorrow so I want you to remember back at least a decade didn't half remember tennis great John McEnroe III never I never forget tennis great John McEnroe he is he is always in my thoughts you know see the game show right oh he's I mean he does tons of TV actually I really I really like his commentary my wife is a huge tennis fan so anytime there's like a major tournament we're watching we're watching the tennis and and history I'm trying to get somewhere dude I would actually you know have to profess my undying love and affection for tennis great John McEnroe so I'm saying so back in 2002 you hosted called let's share there was a game show mix trivia with heart rate limits and you know between the questions you had to face very confronting challenges that raised your heart rate that you know got your fear up and you have you have to lower your heart rate to a certain level before you could progressed on to the necros next question otherwise your cash value would cash winnings would drop off that sounds like a gasps I think I'm thinking that at some point we'll have a movie where it'll take the form of the chair game show and then you know hackers will create this world where it everyone is like you they extort money from them unless their heart rates are like below a certain level or something kind of kind of like speed with your heart rate instead of the buses speedometer going on yeah there's lots of mental games abduction that could be the dystopian leaving we need in order to turn the tide on this whole data tracking and you know just get people more aware and more careful that this stuff well and we're definitely we're definitely in that phase of a lobster pot effect because I think if some of these tech if some of this tech could come out even like five years ago I think consumers would have been a lot more skeptical I keep pointing to the example of the Xbox Kinect and how many people reacted fairly negatively to the idea of an always-on listening microphone in your living room and now it you know on the regular we're getting reports about Smart TVs being compromised we're putting you know smart speakers in every room of the house and people often aren't utilizing the best possible security or two-factor authentication or keeping those devices updated against potential security threats and it's just sort of commonplace that we've traded a significant portion of our privacy for convenience and that's not necessarily a bad thing but along the way we do need to audit this industry not an individual company but audit the industry to say who's doing a good job who do we trust and what potential threats are out there and again a story like this where we're talking about military troop movements I don't understand military policy which doesn't react viscerally swiftly and and with you know with a high degree of of precision in fixing a problem like that you know the most immediate idea that comes to mind is like if you're active duty if you're involved with troop movements if you're in logistics you don't get to wear smartwatches and fitness tracker this is where the developing markets all the developing that we've talked about take over like they all they have to do is use the plot data and come up with some conniving schemes to just the internet base and take them over and you get all the passwords or whatnot I think got a happening maybe time this is this gonna be the turn of the new world order that we've been looking forward to ray I for one welcome our new AI robot overlords I for welcome welcome Tim I don't even know what I'm saying did segways excuse me again in cleaning out my PC and trying to fix my workstation my office is so full of dust attack in front of the microphone and it's so gross because it's probably mostly like degraded human skin cells so um 10 gigabytes of RAM 512 gigabytes of storage two years ago I would have said how ridiculous this is complete overkill for a phone I'm cranky and old kids get off my lawn why do you need that way away away away away the fact that I've now been producing a lot of content directly from my phone putting together vlogs editing video on-the-fly writing documents while watching movies some fairly aggressive use directly from a phone and I'm super excited about future products that will do better screen mirroring or enable a desktop mode I am now 100% completely on board and wanting to see if we can push this even further like I want 4k displays yeah yeah I mean like I want to push I want to push our phones into true laptop grade spec territory especially as we already have some pretty clear indications that we've got things on the horizon like windows on arm once we have our project Linda a Seuss's mobile line of displays accessories a better implement or mimic a laptop style or a desktop style control just the fact that you can easily plug a USB cable into a device I did a little hands-on review on you know like a capacitive stylus for all phones those things all wrapped up together I do think speak to the blossoming power of smartphone in your pocket you know much wider ecosystem of actually getting to done and so I think Qualcomm 845 is going to be one of those good transitionary time periods as we start making that migration into true productivity laptop grade productivity that fits in our pocket and can be expanded upon either through you know gimmicks like folding screens or good ecosystem accessories like laptop cradles and external displays yeah yeah and I mean I'm just I'm just wondering what the heck I can do with 16 gigs of RAM on a phone right now and and to be honest I can't think of any ways that I would be able to follow up without you know just having natural bugs and whatnot slow it down so that we get to the point where we mineralization of the fabrications that we use to produce these chips get you know so that 16 gigs of ram doesn't seem ridiculous to put into a like a 5 inch phone no you're not you're not wrong because we're still ahead of the curve you know we're the hardware is still going to be far and away overkill for what software currently can do but when I say the 845 is a TriNet transitionary step I mean over the life cycle of the 845 and I'm assuming around 2 years of use for this chipset for people who are buying into this ecosystem by the time we get to the end of life on the 8:45 I wholly expect that we'll have seen another generational or three generational improvement - absent services so where we were when the iPad 9.7 Pro came out where I couldn't finish a review of the iPad on the iPad I tried to edit video and record the the vo I tried to do everything in my production on the iPad and I couldn't quite finish a video that would have been similar to how I would have produced a a video on my laptop flash forward a year to Android devices with PowerDirector and you know good hardware in good RAM and 4k video shooting and rendering capabilities and I can I can do it now I can finish these videos I can get my actual work done we've we've we've transitioned into true pro productivity we have a lot of bugs to work out app developers they'd like to have more of you know the customization because the like the features you still have to put in a 16 by 9 art asset and you can't have PNG that's out oh no I can do all that I can do transparencies I can do transitions I can do three I can do three tracks of images five tracks of audio I can do color correction I can do green screen I can do all of it it's not as seamless and it's not as fluid is when I'm producing on a proper workstation but still I'd argue that I need one more really a couple more of those things going on here but we're getting close we're getting close but that's but that's what I'm saying is if we're talking about transition we're never there it's all a work in progress it's all it's all constant this is like until death and so over over the next two years considering how far we've come over the last year over the next two years I feel that there could be a segment of this population especially as more specialist devices come out that was a really cumbersome sentence especially as more specialist devices come out but it's only going to take a handful of players in this space to show off truly high-end and demographic focused solutions a player like red getting into this space starts to bring legitimacy to a market of mobile high-end video production and using your phone to fit into that kind of workflow a few more players like that really speaks to where where we could go with this style of work and productivity and if we have a couple companies out there that are actually trying to push the boundaries on making sure the hardware solutions are in place for the developers to take advantage of that then I think that's that's the right play I think that's the right action to handle it's all the more interesting that it's coming from a company like vivo where the few a few products I've experienced of theirs have been more that see of mid Rangers and selfie cameras and like really popular sort of you know younger consumer fair to see them come out with some of these specs means that the specs war is kind of done you know you can make a phone that's essentially laptop grade powerful and now it's up to software developers to take advantage of it I think they're still just more in terms of ilium to OEM the PvP sword-fighting button no that's for well I mean I mean what I'm saying is when you actually get to the consumer facing release you know there's gonna be a ton of stuff happening behind the scenes there's still a ton of argument over how we're gonna handle neural processing ai machine learning everyone's trying to create their own standard that plugs into Universal you know development but we discs themselves I mean you know we could be talking about two four gigabyte LP are ddr3 discs and then a1 and like a two gigabyte lpddr3 are too even and it could be in like the ten gigabytes that they're doing but you know you'd hope that's something happens in terms of getting those parts together in high quality high throughput is just I mean so getting into the grind on what what the actual hardware is that that will be important and I know a lot of people in especially in our comments on videos are going to be paying attention to you know even just what what class and grade of storage is that for 512 are you gonna be getting 512 gigabytes of like ufs 2.1 people are gonna care about that but the vast consumers out there once its consumer facing like that and once those specs actually exist and we start to see some software taking advantage of more aggressive hardware they're not gonna care at least the first one the first blush is always going to be the they're not going to care but you know over talked we we do have a tweet from renato Laporte using pn weekly attend gigabytes of ram on a phone finally i can use chrome like once we have hardware like that think about blurring the lines be Chromebooks and chrome is a desktop style operating system and the web browser on your phone being a truly desktop grade browsing experience as we're adding you know components of apps that are downloaded momentarily for that actual instance you don't have to load a full app because you'll have these sort of apps on-demand services like all of this stuff ties together for having a significant amount of desktop grade storage and memory to accomplish these tasks you know again we talk about the death of Windows Phone but Microsoft could I doubt they will but Microsoft could pull some sort of back-end entry into the mobile space again utilizing Windows as a service on ARM chip sets you know like there's potential there where again even two years ago we would have mocked a move like that but we should probably i mean i'm mock it all day long they're gonna keep trying anyways because it's in there important their interests to try it's it's all the funnier when we know that the the top brass at Microsoft have no interest in that kind of mobile strategy and they're pushing everything server side I think they really are impressed with themselves about potentially unseating Apple is the most valuable company on the planet they a third cake now they want the frosting which is hilarious oh you want to go to LG purposely threw the little apple at Bing in theirs and we could make a transition okay okay so apparently I got this the the update this morning about the arbitration you know apparently because when I went into the story about LG's settlements with the the class it's like you had all the details like it was reported beforehand and Gerard gives the lawsuit that's representing the class here had a site up dedicated to you know the settlement and by the time I got to it all the content was gone and Germany and apparently there was nothing I could get from the company about it the when I looked up like the original page where they said that they were working on the case it just said LG is extending their warranty call LG and that's all incontinent and then apparently Ars Technica made the official calls in apparently that's that's that's all I get him so well first of all let's just kind of recap sorry I I do apologize listeners and viewers like I am I am trying as hard as I can not to hack up with all of this dust going through my lungs right now real quick can can we recap what did what did the settlement what what did the class-action lawsuit reveal or what were some of the benefits because we've been hearing the echo chamber on LG plus boot loop since the g4 people who were concerned about it affecting the v10 Nexus devices and out of all of the phones of LG recently the g5 was my most problematic where I went through three of them and in the one I have that still technically works kind of doesn't work what what what were people in for is this just the g4 and as far as I know and please correct me if I'm wrong people who weren't a part of this initial batch of class action lawsuit participants are kind of Sol like they can't join this now that the that the settlements been reached yeah all right so the problem it is is that apparently the original issue with the g4 and the subsequent devices being the v10 g5 p20 and the Google Nexus 5x which LG produced was that there was some so there was a soldering issue where it was important like the PCB was not connecting to the CPU and that was causing the boot loops themselves part of that which is the main step that we're talking about here is LG supporting that and not taking those claims and giving them due process and that was part of the issue here now Jerrod Gibbs initially set up the class-action to feature just the G for that class expanded with the v10 g5v 25x and that was all in the start of 2017 technically oh what a lot of what LG a lot of companies actually have clauses in their contracts in you know for end-users it says that if you agreed to certain things or if you if you don't talk down which was the case here of certain things then you agree to not sue LG and you would go into arbitration can determine remediation and what was initially reported what was initially published actually was a $700 credit for another LG handset or four hundred twenty-five dollars in cash and there was a form out and if you owned any of the devices that were affected if yet Ciera number proof of purchase you were able to get into the the payments but that all got taken down and what is actually being reported by ours here is that's only the those who joined the party those who joined the class action will be going forward with into with this apparently this helmet and that other customers will be going forward with 30 months of from the date of purchase that they can get but activate the warranty and get it replaced at no cost so I mean and we have seen some other alternatives if they you know if some adventurous people want to go to China and get some of the board replaced get six they can do that for like $120 that was an unofficial thing but you know that seems like the best idea like how much you really want to really you just want to give the finger to the whole process just because it's so in a separate Google problem a Google solution when what was it the the 5x some of the settlement seems to have impacted Google strategy for replacing five X's which have had battery and blooping problems ever since these two because there were some batches of that too again it was I think it was a little bit harder to glean how chronic the issue was on the 6p versus just the echo chamber at work whereas the 5x seemed and again this is I don't have numbers to back this up these are just my feelers the the 5x seemed to have more ready and discernible problems but I thought it was kind of interesting seeing like they didn't they released a program where they were going to be replacing select phones that were suffering from very specific problems with the Moto X 4 yeah that's well I mean their friends from 2015 anyway so at this point they'd be there'd be well out of production and they I mean so it could be that the lawsuits are a part of it but it's more likely that they're just out of production and that the only way that they would be able to satisfy what they could in the warranty was to replace it with a what they consume right yeah exactly so that's there's a mix of that we're getting into that Twilight phase here where things just kind of blur yeah it's kind of difficult to tell like on a phone that came out you know in 2015 are you really having problems that are a manufacturer based or are you just succumbing to your phone being 2 plus years old life cycles we and those are those are just great I've been going through like just some old device is to kind of like see like if there's anything worth revisiting just how many of them won't power on won't charge like oh no tech does not last like we think it should that's crazy well one of the things that does last more often surprisingly that's not the iPhone I mean we've seen refurbished units go up for sale and they'd seem to last pretty well if left to their own devices and not you know you know slammed into that right prior prior to iOS 10 yeah I do iOS 10 point to point do J and SEC trying to just go after seeing if they can do anything about this see if they can get a people against Apple case going on here is that I think it's I think it's totally worth the investigation um I I don't I don't feel it truly raised rises to the level of you know actionable legal severe legal consequences to Apple especially with whatever reason why Apple still gets to be a sweetheart company for state and federal governments how many iPhones are utilized in military national science national defense and politics law enforcement you know you you you we've kind of arrived at the iPhone being some sort of de facto standard for all of these different agencies I don't think we'll get to anything that's going to be severely punitive but I really do hope that there is a public examination of the company's business practices especially after we just went through all of these tax shenanigans with them you know sort of playing ball with them extorting at lower tax rate so they could repatriate funds that they weren't really paying their tax bill on also that they could drop their tax rate they weren't paying taxes and they want to pay less taxes is is again you know kind of a kind of a scummy business practice from a company that's supposed to be this American industry sweetheart so I think they're overdue just some kind of examination into how they do business how they really with their customers and and like not just taking the narrative of Apple on its face value really did into some of these behaviors I think they went a little too far and I hope that enough of this messaging comes out that fans of iOS and fans of iPhones can demand from their favorite manufacturer improvements you should not be building a thousand dollar smartphone which only has the bare minimum battery capacity to last you the day and will degrade with no buffer and their only solution is to slow down the power draw from the CPU that is terrible design that is very anti consumer design and it's cynically not only just planned obsolescence but an aggressive tactic at trying to make yearly product cycles more desirable than they really are you know you get to that point where even after a year you're now threatening phones if you run the phone at full power you could experience you know reboots or you know sudden power loss or you know sudden power cycling stuff like that that's not ok we we should all be able to say that's not ok so I do hope that we see some aggressive examination of the company though I doubt anything seriously punitive will come from it I would like to see what happens in Australia because according to show that I peruse very often the check out from ABC there are consumer law is pretty intense and they have more strict terms about what's you know considered good for a lifecycle or the life of the product and when they have plenty of stuff so if anything is I mean they've tried for certain things like iTunes purchases where yeah you know so there's there's a whole bunch of like I bet you you will probably be a bit more aggressive too just because an Apple doesn't have the best name in Europe because of their tax shenanigans so again like regulatory agencies outside of the United States are all kind of itching to take a bigger bite out of this company III realize like I could have gone full pun on taking a bigger bite out of the Apple and then decided against it but I still told you about the pun that was in my mind because that's good I mean in the US it's the code of Meck well yeah but again we have this this notion of them being this this like you know we're somehow by having one of the world's most profitable companies as an American company but they're really not you know their their headquarters were moved on paper just so that they could benefit from preferential tax treatment overseas so I feel like if they want to leave then we should stop pretending that they're this darling of an American company while they're sort of holding jobs as ransom for you know what they might build for a future campus or new Apple stores or new manufacturing here in the United States if they don't want to play ball bye-bye the current rules and they want to throw money into offshore tax havens then I don't think we should be giving them the kind of like special treatment that the company seems to get whenever they come up under these investigations think any of those 20,000 new jobs will be dedicated to that iPhone I seen to that probably not as according to PocketNow I don't know if you've read this blog it's a it's a really handy tech news blog they do a really good job of reporting on these kinds of stories that again for all of their money for all of their wealth they keep a very limited team of engineers and developers on tap to build their products and they're they are very aggressive about moving team members to different projects there's a problem with iOS they'll pull people off of OS X and Mac books and Mac Pros to help with iPhone problems and vice versa way Steve Jobs would have wanted to well I mean but the thing is like the I do I do believe that a company climate of trying to keep a small dedicated skunkworks level top secrecy team of developers and engineers working on your products makes sense for how few products Apple actually produces but that absolutely means that their resources are constantly complete with there are problems not only problems just when they're doing business normally when everything's working like it should you're near capacity for what your team members can actually accomplish and moving them around means you you have to beg and borrow time from different from different products different projects so it would make sense to me that the land of i/os if something was gonna take a backseat for a short period of time it would be a lower-cost iPhone I think especially with the iPhone 10 not resonating as well as I think Apple hoped it would in in sales numbers their solution isn't going to be well let's make up more money by dedicating resources to building a lower cost lower margin iPhone it's going to be let's really make sure that for iPhone 9 or iPhone 11 or whatever it is that they're going to call it that we can really come out swinging swinging with a desirable lifestyle product that can build some buzz again McKnight wonder where the staff goes because Microsoft it's you know comparable staff roles of was a hundred thousand where as Apple was last reported to have 120,000 or so and miter saw cutting down it started mostly with the Nokia with the hardware going away and cuts into most of their hardware divisions able to make anything at this point and even with that but yeah that's fair but even with that they're still mostly you know doing software and whatnot and that's that still warms a hundred thousand people whereas Apple like where where does the staff all go do they go to the stores because there's only like 50 people per store at best if not you know because I mean cuz you know that's a very good question Jules and Apple is exactly the kind of secretive company where I doubt we'd ever get a very clear glimpse into how they dedicate resources but for for right now I would be willing to put good money on the internal culture at Apple being all hands on deck for iPhone 9 that they want their highest margin product to launch as smoothly as they can we saw the recent news that they're gonna be backing off of new features in iOS until they can sort out some of the stability issues fix some of the software ground gremlins which are still plaguing iOS 11 they want to be the I everything looks to me like a conservative implementation of dedicating resources towards next-gen iPhone to be the proper relaunch of the iPhone brand finally get us away from the iPhone 6 form factor potentially move all of their devices to 2x1 plus aspect ratio displays and and make sure that everything is cooking for them to recreate a level of desirability that iPhone 10 sort of fizzle that that's what I think they're doing and so they can't have you know a lot of time energy or money dedicated towards refreshing iPhone se which is a shame but I kind of feel like with the number of people have met out there that still have iPhone 5s is iPhone 6s let alone iPhone 6s is iPhone se can exist like it can probably throughout this year I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of this year I'm still perfectly happy with the experience on my iPhone se it's it's been working a champ I've been happy at the end of this year I'll probably swap the battery just cuz it'll be cheap and moving forward like if we can get a refresh on that for 2019 then maybe we're in good territory there again - I just haven't seen those evergreen phones they can always just pop and again it really speaks to the usage of a phone like the iPhone se I'm not looking at the iPhone se as a way to have top-tier multimedia capabilities or I'm not trying to produce you know aggressive video content on it it is the best on-the-go short interaction burst of interaction communications device for one thumb users and I don't need a whole ton of horsepower to interact with social media email take a couple nice photos it's not the best camera anymore but it's still a good camera I don't need to go crazy with the hardware to accomplish those tasks and as long as it's still lean fluid smooth simple lower resolution display not taking up too many resources then the SE is still going to be delightfully competitive in a world of mid-range errs and finally we got the whole pod here first bid into the industry so basically you just have to deal with is that it yeah I mean I think I think this world is currently going Alexa Google home Bixby and then home pod I'm gonna kind of pair it there's a buddy of mine Jason T Lewis who does painfully honest tech on YouTube and he's just kind of a kind of a groovy FM radio kind of voice gonna tell you about all things that bugs him and why home pod is such a failure he comes out I mean he's a cool dude he comes out of a like legit recording so he's got that kind of vibe down musicians he's great I did like a three hour Joe Rogan style conversation podcast with him last week but his whole thing you have to be careful as a company like Apple because Apple does a tremendously good job of educating consumers and helping consumer basis interact with tech one of the best advantages of Apple as a company is taking raw tech and polishing it up for a much nicer user experience within an ecosystem but the danger of that is once you've educated consumers to interact with tech products they can start to look at the rest of the market and see what other benefits there might be so home pod still for me fits into a category kind of like the Google home max where audio doesn't cycle like tech does if you already own a really nice home stereo system home audio system you're not going to want to replace major parts of that with janky little consumer tech speakers that can talk to you you might want to incorporate smart assistant features but you'll want to plug that into your existing framework not replace your current audio solution with the actual noise generating hardware and Apple is coming at this banking on their brand name so it's an Apple premium product that the Apple label carries a premium price tag features won't be available at launch and it doesn't out-compete current solutions I mean Jason brought it up and I think he's spot on it doesn't compete products like Sonos and i think i would be willing to wager that if we did a blind taste test mm-hmm that people listening to home pod listening to Google home listening to echo and listening to so knows that the Sonos would probably win in a blind showdown of audio quality between these different solutions these different devices and products and so this is the trap that Apple finds themselves in they are not leading the way they did not create this product segment they're not doing anything to radically move the needle on this product segment and they're just reacting to a market that they're falling further behind I'm putting Apple you know just above Cortana right now like this this is not this is not the killer app where I think they could have leveraged their user base on Apple TV to better incorporate audio and smart speakers into an Apple ecosystem to an Apple lifestyle I don't think hold on gets the job done Siri remote you know the implemented skills like that it's been slow going what why cuz now now you have a fracture in the Apple ecosystem where Apple TV could have been the backbone I mean my Samsung TV we just got a new Samsung TV is a new Q LED and it's got a microphone in the remote to do voice actions on our Smart TV that then control our speaker's interact with different apps and services plugs directly into this whole ecosystem we're using our chromecast a little bit less because it's got better interaction with Amazon video streaming services yeah but you know the Apple TV competes with another with a whole bunch of over-the-top services they're not necessarily if people want an integrating experience with TV they can just get one with I don't know Google sustain I don't know that's what I'm saying is someone who was in the market for the Apple ecosystem and wanted an Apple TV that would have been your user base for a home pod but already you know like a lot of people their first line of audio interaction is going to be their TV or a soundbar connected to their TV so what benefit does home pod bring over the most accessed and most trafficked room of the house having the best speaker system in the house and the best interaction capabilities through Apple TV already you can't keep carving into the same market and not redefining this for new consumers to find why Apple might be the superior choice you know this this to me is what's so confusing about the home pod launch is I think they're trying to shear the same sheep but Apple TV has already sheared this sheep and how do you convince people to double down on this when the Apple TV solution is superior I mean it's it's all in the form factor I think because that that's just it you're going after what people recognize as the medium for a service you know it's not Apple tu you the Apple TV it has its chance and in fact you know yeah it had taken till 2015 when Amazon debuted a speaker of all things and that's the you know that's where the craze is now so unfortunately this bill is still a decently performing segment for for Apple I mean it doesn't have quite the same other products and music but it still it still represents a growing market for products and services the exact mix of that because they don't they they don't ever disclose it but they you know from their Quarterly's they do talk about what segments are growing and Apple TV is commonly listed alongside services like like Apple music so we know that there is a growing demo there I just don't see how home pod services that market any better than other iTunes capable Wi-Fi speakers that can be cross-platform or interact with multiple voice assistants or deliver better sound quality at a lower price and the consumer who's really apt to do just a little comparative shopping is probably not gonna walk away with home pod being the the victor in most show downs especially when they might already have something like an Apple TV to interact with I think that we've lost you've lost the fight Apple things that media goes on TV and smart assistants go to digital and that's why they're doing the efforts there silently the efforts that you're doing like that and see but even that was following on a whole bunch of gross from Netflix and their biggest competitor ever to hell Amazon so even Apple yeah was there was their platform for launching Siri in the living room you know so again for whatever whatever uses that consumers might make in a smart assistant in the Apple ecosystem I think they're I think they're already handled and I think that's why we see my gross speculation on his stories I think that's why we see home pod launching to very tempered responses very you know very conservative reactions and why you can still buy one like they're not sold out this isn't something that I think was really gonna take the world by storm and they're late to this product segment and like Apple watch they need to now justify why their solution will be superior for consumers in a world where Alexa's gotten really good Google Homes been getting better and the sort of smart periphery of devices that listen to you and react to you and interact with other smart home features has gotten really good Apple now needs to play catch-up winning the hearts and minds of consumers against the two other biggest tech companies on the planet so it's gonna be an uphill battle I'm messin Apple can't do it but I totally appreciate I totally understand why home pod was the the fizzle of a launch that it was and here's a slack key and weekly what would app will have to do to make those on Android consider jumping ship they're already making people jumping ship as they have touted quarter after quarter of growth of conversions from Android to iOS so it's I mean you know the phones are doing well for them and there's always going to be the the Android as right now at least as far the growth far paces any porting out that is happening so for them yeah I mean especially in a mature market I don't even know that it's necessarily I don't know that it's necessarily a direct situation where Apple needs to say we can make Android users switch teams more I think the company that's really going to set the stage for the next phase of internetting is gonna be the company that finds some killer hooks into the novel application of data and services in augmented reality in smart home and in making services platform agnostic I was getting into a conversation with Renato Laporte just on Twitter here a couple tweets back and forth and he was saying like it'd be really cool if we have Windows on arm you know I could make I could have an Android phone that then turns into a Windows PC when I plug it into a laptop you know it'd be the same hardware that has the same support and we're getting to a point where I might not need it I might not need Windows if I can already do my my writing and editing in Microsoft Office and I already have apps and services that follow my cloud onedrive I already have video editing software that works sort of platform agnostic the operating system isn't really gonna matter that much so Apple I think just needs to get ahead of what the next phase of their relationship with consumers is going to be they had this huge COO with consumers putting smartphones into consumers hands with the iPhone that gave them 10 years of market dominance but I don't think it's gonna carry them through if they are late to the party on the next phase of data and services I think they move better than first that we can take well in Apple was first for targeting consumers you know before before the iPhone smartphones were targeted at business people and why would you need email all the time what are you on some kind of leash that's not sexy or desirable blackberries are ugly windows phones are clunky Palm Pilots are laggy you know like everything was painful for consumers until the iPhone gave you a real web browser in your pocket that's what's going to dictate the next phase of the top most successful company in tech ruling the ecosystem is who's really got the balls to to make that play first who's really got the hutzpah to transition over into a new form of interactivity with services that consumers latch onto and right now no one wants to be first no one wants to be first because they'll be criticized than people will actually go with them on that experiment and then the second company to come out with that will actually win just because the first company introduced the concept consumers started to get comfortable with it and then someone else came comes along and makes it exciting and sexy that's why we're in this big holding pattern I think we could probably be further along in a our heads up tech face computing better audio interactions and AI if we were able to convince consumers to go along with a few more experiments rather than being so conservative about everything Andrew Wallace also on the hashtag P and weekly on Twitter we're still live people you can still join in we'd like to see some new faces to capital is to iOS 11 like Android is to Ice Cream Sandwich I was about to comment that it would be more like lollipop just because of how inefficient it was in tie-in you know time with the Qualcomm issue of that year yeah but just in honestly just because of how many bug fixes that you know this had to happen Ice Cream Sandwich also introduced you know it was jelly bean and then it was and then the photo time and the KitKat and I sort of consider for as like this whole family of updates thing as opposed to just one certain thing and it just like well I don't know that's fair we've been we've been focused on iOS 11 bugs because they've been they've been so uncharacteristically aggressive from a company like Apple like some some pretty bad problems that iOS launched with that that needed fixing after consumers already got their hands on the update but that shouldn't completely overshadow some of the teething pains that we've had for Android ate the Oreo has had a few little gremlins that exacts a stoppage of updates from rolling ends you know they've been fixed a lot of these have been fixed in android 8.1 but then we have to have that conversation about the Android ecosystem not pushing out updates directly to consumers you know how many phones will be getting Android a I've got my huawei May 10 Pro Android 8 that's super cool I've got my xperia x z1 compact Android 8 that's really cool when should I expect that we'll get some of these power management and device stability gremlins ironed out with 8.1 updates and we'll those companies skip 8.1 to do some future you know 8.2 or 8.3 build of Android gonna skip 8.0 for 8.1 yep and that's the right play but it's also taking so long there should have been in Android update for the essential phone one should have happened quicker just just well 8.1 should have happened quicker if 8.0 was going to be that buggy then 8.1 should have been just you know what that's abandoned a point oh and just go for it so and one final tweets in main engine yeah I just got that one too oh you okay yeah he was just interested slack using the PM weekly hashtag premium audio companies incorporating smart technology is way better than buying speakers from a tech company and I'm potentially looking at hosting a debate on things like the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack in the future of audio in a number of different or really is people a new audience on us and and harbin representatives together design Flynn Bowers and Wilkins are putting out Bluetooth headsets with active noise cancellation there's definitely something turning in the world of audio and I know what companies I trust for high quality audio and a lot of them are starting to embrace not only mobile but just like home tech in general Sennheiser put out a sound bar that's crazy but I mean that's crazy Sennheiser is like one of the most respected you know recording audio technology companies on the planet and they have some really compelling consumer focused tack on the horizon which could be very disruptive and very exciting I was going to end this on David Bautista desilva's a cynical common folks nobody can make sorry billions by spending money on workers or quality this is business 101 and he has chief of mr. Smithers from The Simpsons just wiggling his finger yes well um we do want to wrap up this week's show talking about just a little thought experiment on some politics and some business news that broke the White House commented on some of the story got kind of walked back a little bit some fears in the market and just interesting seeing different factions of excuse me of White House communications discussing these topics uh you know and finding pushback from other agencies like the FCC and that's of course we're talking about the news on some of the internal reports in the White House on Trump looking to nationalize a future 5g network for the United States cutting China telecommunications equipment out of the loop and potentially even taking the future of 5g out of the hands of corporations ISPs and cell phone carriers to make it a state-run solution for networking and telecommunications you know American citizens would work would do business directly with the federal government to to utilize future 5g Services that story was walked back that this report had was wasn't timely that it was a dated report just an internal sort of examination of the market not necessary it was senior National Security Council first right and something that they weren't actively looking at the potential for implementation but was just sort of you know sort of a political what-if scenario that they were examining internally and along the way both conservative and liberal members of the FCC expressing concern and you know disagreeing with this as a potential recourse for the future of telecommunications this is definitely one of the more interesting topics because you know I don't know that I'd ever would have considered myself agreeing with FCC Chairman edgy PI on anything yet his reply to this was something that I found a number of liberals and conservatives in the tech space probably would have agreed on the idea of a fully nationalized 5g net work completely owned operated and controlled by the the federal government probably a bad idea yeah so now I would be interested in considering what it would be like if we had a public infrastructure in the first place because we have roads we have you know telephone system has been dominated by you know one company and it was forced to break up and then bring combined all together again there's been a lot of alternate thing yeah the telecommunication space mobile too and but still very it's a very highly competitive it's the frontier of telecommunications at this point in billions of dollars would be important to it but what if the government decided hey let's build the the network anyways or if think if there was a ground level kind of thing going on and they didn't have to you know acquire existing construction sites or whatnot well they they could they could you leverage eminent domain to build any way they wanted you so this this would be if we're if we're entertaining this is some sort of intellectual exercise immediately I think we can point to the success of the network unrolling and being built very very quickly I know a lot of people would probably disagree with me on oh the federal government can't do anything right says straw man who disagrees what you wouldn't have to deal with freaking you know media acquisitions and oh hey here's the government trying to sell off a freaking madman or something well think is it and precisely because the government can also you know enact and remove rules which could have been barriers immediately like they they make the rules so the rules technically don't apply to them because they can change the rules on the fly for however they want to utilize this network the other thing that could be a net positive for consumers would be having one universal and unified standard across the entire country it would immediately cut out the fake competition we have between carriers lie Sprint and Verizon on one side using CDMA for their fallback 3G uh opposite t-mobile us is it US Cellular yeah US Cellular and you were sorry to see the advice to the USL your seating in me also yeah I thought they were GSM okay sorry flipped that reverse it but again we have sort of a fake dichotomy of competition between replicated technologies there really wasn't any positive or benefit for consumers having CDMA and GSM based 3G in the market at the same time we just reinvented the wheel and it caused a significant amount of consumer lock-in so you couldn't do what they do in Europe where you could take your phone to another carrier for competition we lacked that capability here we had much stricter consumer lock-in because of those differing technologies so that would be a potential benefit is not monkeying around with sort of artificial constraint in the market if the federal government dictates this is our network this is how you connect to it and you know this is the universal compatibility that devices will have to adhere to well there's still a lot of debate about you know its relationship to the private sector because they're still producing the telecom equipment and the ultimate end-user component of all this stuff in you know there's there has to be some jockeying around of that too yeah but but the but the government would arrive on one standard you know they would put enough they would put up like no bid contracts so that American infrastructure companies would immediately profit to the tune of billions and billions of dollars and then we would have 1:1 throughput we would have one method of connectivity that they would have complete control over so really as soon as you get out of those two consumer benefits from my perspective everything else is a tragic negative for the federal government owning operating and controlling every aspect of a 5g network for consumers everything after that point I think is is downhill for us from Andrew Wallace brings up the point you would worry about government intrusion government access to spy on us if the 5g was completely controlled we live in an era right now where net neutrality doesn't exist so they would be able to completely control search and narrative get in between services and consumers and not only spy but actively redirect or change information that consumers have access to and then you would also have the bureaucratic relationship of how is this whole thing implemented you know as much as I am a bleeding-heart liberal there are times where it's it might my complaints about living in California and not having fiber gigabit internet a component of that is the fact that I live in the most liberal state in the in the nation and I have to at least own my liberal shame whenever we do things that screw up too so I really feel like the the UK and the EU implementation of having stricter government regulation you know stricter federal guidelines for how these services unroll and then the administration and in sort of iteration at the ground level falls on state and local governments and the companies that do business with state and local governments we have a huge uphill battle to fight in competition at the state and local level that that's still a major problem and one of the things that I think affects the the net neutrality debate but I still think it's better to have companies waging that battle and competing against each other than it would be to have one overall dictating resource from the federal government controlling those aspects and I think this this current administration is a perfect example of the fact that government works and sometimes it works even when we don't want it to you know when we had the Obama administration in place we saw guidelines moving towards net neutrality people voted out liberals voted in conservatives and within a year we voted to remove net neutrality policy whenever we have that pendulum swing then that federal government will get to dictate and decide what happens to the internet and it's always going to be this hard pendulum flip back and forth and back and forth and I think that would also cause a ton of market instability you know for other companies that have to do business on the inner you can't trust in four years when the new administration comes in what's their policy on censorship what's their policy on net neutrality what's their policy on communications competition against traditional cell phone and data carriers I think just across the board this would be ruinous for the North American economy so I want to take at least a cursory look at something you know where government was involved in an infrastructure project to this effect that would be Australia with the National Broadband Network and B n first came out proposals first came out in 2010 and then it was started with a oppose the opposing government taking over and then carrying out the idea in opposing the leader of the opposing camera at the time was like no we're not going to do this and you know I'm not doing it anyway so yeah there's that but it was a project to take ah replace all the copper wiring with fiber mm-hmm over time the politics of that the money of that was kind of switched around and you know we weren't dealing with you know net neutrality with all these kind of other you know contingent rules about eminent of information domain and whatnot but it was funny because like there's fiber you know and then ended up being well we have to connect to the interchanges exchanges and then the nodes and you know it was originally going to be fiber to the door fiber to the house fiber town now and then it became fibre to the node and you know and all the copper wiring that still exists and still has to go through speeds of gigabit you know it's now it's 25 yeah I can't even get I can barely get a 20 megabit upload which again puts a huge crimp on ability to stream to create content to sort of leverage you know a competitive stance in the world economy when you know like our editor-in-chief Tony is paying like 10 bucks a month for gigabit upload speeds in Romania I'm suddenly less competitive as a content creator in again one of the world's largest economies and the most liberal state in the United States so this this is another thing too we've gotten some comments here using the the PN weekly hash tag we we have we do need to do sort of an accounting there were numerous fees associated with cable companies and cell phone carriers that would be tacked on to your bills for things like infrastructure and improvement and there was a promise that we would be building out fiber-to-the-home those companies largely sat on that cash and it became - sort of another method of profitability for those companies not to say that there weren't Network improvements we can all point to marginal and iterative Network improvements but we never got what was promised us and I think that's why we're also seeing a community backlash in making more sort of community funded initiatives for things like broadband and we saw in Colorado with them fighting a verizon lawsuit to do that so this is from Renato Laporte in the Netherlands every house has a telephone cable because it was once made by a state-run company who didn't look at the costs now that same company which is private has put Fiber to home in only two percent of the houses because it's costly so having the network being run by the government and selling capacity to providers could be a solution to companies not covering rural areas because it costs a lot of money and has no returns but there are also many downsides and this is another huge debate that we're having here in the United States with how vast you know the the differing areas between urban and rural communities are it can't just be a market led decision this is the liberal in me we can't rely solely on the market because the market is perfectly happy to write off a significant amount of this population they are not worth investing in improving data infrastructure data services you just can't make enough money on them so they just don't exist and that is a terrible position for a population segment in the United States to just suddenly disappear from the world economy they are no longer they are currently not competitive and they don't exist in this conversation activism that's going on with via connected internet premises their their political power just drops - Oh totally oh and they are not a part of this conversation they and this becomes a cyclical generational problem - they are not worth investing in now which means their schools their hospitals their communities are already underperforming and they're just gonna continue to fall further and further and further behind farther and farther and farther behind the rest of the population more urban and dense population centers so we need to find some kind of balance there if those people want to come together in their community and build a network and an infrastructure based on their own tax dollars they should be allowed to if they can show that companies refuse to service them and we shouldn't have to fear a Verizon going in to sue and under you know underperforming poor municipality and you know try and lawyer them to death while they're also disingenuously saying like oh we offer you broadband you have you know a 1 megabit DSL connection that's kinda like broadband we should be able to point to better solutions than that but we're also I mean that's also why we're completely stuck on a number of these issues laws that the state-level kind of prevent a lot of that stuff and that's also what Andrew sis lack is writing and P and weekly is there a way the government can subsidize the implementations of 5g and I'm sure there is but then we also get into some of the the uglier discussions on the government picking winners and losers you know III do share some concerns with my more libertarian leaning friends and tech pundits because we're sort of stuck in a holding pattern right now what company is really going to invest in smaller communities and more rural communities and major cities that don't have real competition at the same time how can we make sure that the market actually does perform the way it's supposed to even under the guiding hand of regulation and not just picking all Verizon's kind of winning so we'll just dump a whole bunch of money on Verizon and they can solve all the problems that doesn't really service the future of American tell Communications and it's a really ugly problem to try and unravel that's that is actually I make jokes about it but that actually is what we're trying to face here in Southern California is we want to see what companies can truly deliver fiber solutions to homes give them Pole access give them zoning for digging trenches if they need to data centers but the host companies actually need to be able to deliver on that in a way that current cable and cell phone companies have promised but not delivered on those kinds of promises so you get the sticky back and forth you know if an 18t can't really deliver on a u-verse for the entire Greater la metropolitan area then we shouldn't be giving them preferential zoning treatment but if we don't give them preferential zoning treatment and they're not even going to try so I think it's already a dirt on enforcing the rules that it already has because you know the free-market attitudes prevailing in the current administration but you know that's that's just oh yeah free-market isn't really prevailing I mean we see we're seeing them we're seeing this administration absolutely obviously favor certain industries over others certain companies certain regions over other regions and and again I think we're always going to see some element of bias regardless of who's president it's just I don't know that I've ever seen an administration that was so obvious about what winners and losers they wanted to pick you know when we have a president in the State of the Union talking about beautiful clean coal as an energy strategy I think it's pretty clear they're not even pretending to be fair partial or you know objective in this analysis so I just don't have high hopes for any kind of government run or government led initiative at this point at least not until we can we can find some stronger counter voice I least in the Senate in the house and hopefully in other regulatory agencies that can kind of balance the executive at the moment we just have the European Union except the American Union come in and well that's actually I mean Jules you're not wrong in my fear is we're gonna be seeing an increasing distance between the most competitive European and Asian markets and the United States I think we're gonna keep falling behind in general consumer adoption of new tech and and new access and new services and we already see that agree the standards that we don't even adopt yeah well no totally I mean and and we can't even reach some of the standards at these other companies these other companies these other countries take for granted at the moment so when when we're already sort of playing a bad hand and working from a deficit for a huge significant portion of this population I don't see this administration in this current political climate being clever enough to find ways to help us catch up let alone lead the way we're pretending like we still lead the way and we absolutely don't who will is gonna again that's going to be a an economic driver that's going to have an impact on generations of consumers in this space well that's a thought to leave us I guess yeah let's let's let's end on a bummer I think that's always fun yes it's Friday I mean you want to you know just or if you're listening to the audio version of this it's Monday or Tuesday and we got so yeah you know I'm actually as soon as we're out of this podcast I'm gonna finish fixing my workstation and then I am gonna go and grab hopefully get then go into the fetal position yeah and just cry myself to sleep in the shower wait no that's not no that's wrong Lexi to deal with so oh my I slept my daughter to cope with no we're gonna go outside and play and have some fine that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna say everyone go outside take a nice deep breath a breath of fresh air breathe in some some Wi-Fi and 4G and be thankful that you don't have I went to the nude and and go go go do something refreshing and life-affirming so folks I think we're gonna put a pin in it this episode of the pocket net weekly has come and gone finally it's over and of course the conversation outside of this continues on Twitter where you can reach out to Jules at point Jules and I'm humbly at some gadget guy pocket now is around the web on Twitter Instagram Facebook Google+ YouTube and our home sites pocketnow.com and yes dot pocketnow.com shows like this cannot exist without your support sharing the weekly with your friends who love mobile technology and leaving reviews wherever you can review a podcast bringing new faces new listeners to the table new people to join the conversation because shows like this cannot exist without your support we want to thank you guys listening out there sharing the podcast leaving reviews because it wouldn't because this show wouldn't exist if it weren't for our listeners and subscribers who have kept us on the air since 2012 I lastly wouldn't it just wouldn't I regardless of whether or not I can read words on a laptop we wouldn't do anything wink at pizza would enjoy the perish the thigh so the pocket now weekly we'll be back next week with all kinds of delicious technology goodness so make sure you tune back