Gadgetory

that's legal and corporate acquisition news this week Qualcomm and broad camp Qualcomm and Broadcom just can't seem to find that love connection Google and t-mobile face separate lawsuits and you might be in line for a rebate if you replace your iPhone battery at full price we've got a lot to talk about so make sure you're charged and ready for episode two nine one of the pocket men weekly recorded February 9th at noon pacific time 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 buying music CDs was the coolest thing ever and those are apparently going the way of the dodo I'm Juan Carlos bag now senior editor pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. Jules Wong out on the east coast how's it going buddy boy yeah to be honest I'm a little tired today it's a it's a gray day of a Friday so and the mood isn't up to speed as I would like it to be I haven't had coffee today sleepy sooo dude I like I would happily share some of our 80 plus degrees sunshine in weather here in the southwest I mean I need 80 plus degrees I just need sunshine I think I got this artificial thing going on here seasonal affected yeah because you know we're all actually the fact that it's 80 degrees in Los Angeles feels really nice but that makes us crazy nervous about what you know the warmer seasons are gonna be like and especially for those of us out in the valley we're gonna get new come August so I'm not looking forward to that I can't wait to see you fry right it's gonna be some gadget guy on a Hot Tin Roof it's gonna be sizzling like crazy some bacon guy bacon right the whole show I'm gonna look like like guys some really crazy midlife crisis he dude and driving a convertible way to tan those crazy midlife crisis II guy see you know the the the moniker works it works really well that's just questioning you gotta keep it you to keep your on brand with persona in check and what's completely on brand is uh us moving from our general top of Show banter to start digging into the hottest news stories of the week as published on pocketnow.com as shared by people online joining the conversation on twitter with the hashtag bookie and weekly and definitely if you're offline if you're not watching us live i hit up our email address podcast at pocketnow.com we're gonna have our favorite pics the end of this month we promise it was we're gonna try and get back into our viewer mailbag viewer take the wheel shows on a monthly like are you sega Wade he pulled up all the the information that you could there you kind of we're almost going to jump in and then you realized oh we have to talk about it the social so we have to do some admin well then very well may have been the absolute best segue I've ever pulled off in the history of the show I just want that there on one of like not the most exciting news weeks considering we're all kind of getting our pre Proust ready for MWC and you know we're we're between the cliffs here and we're just traveling down the the riverbed and the season before harvest it's we're we're still here though because we want to have this conversation with you find folks out there and there are actually some pretty interesting things to talk about it's just you know it's not gonna get off exactly really hot news we're gonna pretend that this is good or exciting and I'm gonna didn't like put on my radio voice or whatever for the week of February 5th 2018 this is Albany as those with podcast let's start off with Qualcomm which has rejected broad comms revised acquisition offer of 121 billion dollars that's over the magic $80 per share mark that stock holders see but directors has sent a letter to you Broadcom CEO hak tan to negotiate a true highest offer for the company leading to some concerns with technique analysts that if innovations are up for sale to a conservative money making regime but coq10 himself is a pretty harsh negotiator he has not paid more than six percent above his initial offer for any of the recent acquisition acquisitions that he has made google has a few class-action lawsuits going up one of them focuses on the hardware audio issues that it failed to properly support and address on the pixel and original pixel XL another concerns its carrier project Phi where the compiled being billed for public Wi-Fi access which is part of the conceits for the network switching between 4G 3G and Wi-Fi been sued by a victim of a part out scheme prior to telling consumers about a new measure to protect themselves from being switched to another carrier suddenly and for s relief the man claims that the uncarrier failed to provide adequate account security which led ultimately led to him losing thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency wirele fox abhrush British throne om that has invested in Santa Jane in Windows Phone devices has entered into administration and could be looking at complete dissolution soon tearing robotic industries which has long tried to deliver on the world's first phone with liquid morphine is also going through bankruptcy though it says that the process is for selling of rent the speeds and the those will be interesting to watch obviously are we mourn for any loss of competition in this space especially with more marginal players margin it's just we're coming to a point where things are just you know it's the main competitions here it stays and it pretty much sucks any other a player out of the race that's it sorry I think I think the your completion of the new segment there also coincided with a nice little Google there was definitely some bandwidth tearing as we were getting through a couple of those news stories I definitely want to backtrack like take it right back up to the top of the news list and this on going back and forth the will they won't they this is the you know the Sam and Diane or the the moonlighting escapades between Broadcom and Qualcomm well will they ever get back together and once they get together it's gonna wreck all of the romantic tension that we've seen as this dramas played out I think that would be the end of the show if they finally did you know kind of join up get get that this is the show for Valentine's Day so I'm trying to make a bad pun here but uh I don't know I mean it's I mean well it depends I see the whole psyche of what's going on here because as we've seen Qualcomm has been shelling out all the renovations 5g and what and it has been complaining that has been undervalued because of the failure to include nxp it's a gap becoming a physician it's 37 billion dollar acquisition of competing happening and then there's also a few other portfolio things that have been neglected they feel like and this comes about a month away from the annual shareholders meeting where if Broadcom is they have a nomination for its board of directors that they're sending to Qualcomm and it's right now a chance to see if they can pull that off where's Kwok well I'll just be curious to see if like this is qual comes future business strategy every time they get close to a merger then they'll just acquire another company and be like nope or worth more now oh no we spent like twelve billion dollars on this other company can I have to raise that that bid price like I wonder how long they could go before Qualcomm just don't everything and broad comes you don't like Oh we'll give you ninety five dollars a share please this is already the biggest you know deal ever pretty much biggest acquisition of a company and but especially as we get towards the if they do happen to agree on a deal there's certainly plenty more years to have to go into motion and especially with regulators across the world because this would have more countries to and there are se sees there are security Exchange Commission's equivalents to look at this deal because currently broad comes still headquartered in Singapore they're trying to move it to Wes but until then there's national security issues that they have to deal with and it's just par for the course in terms of these kinds of of things but it's it's a mess they say Broadcom says they would close a deal within 12 months which for a deal of this scale is kind of laughs of one that's what Qualcomm did last week with a letter of appeal to its shareholders saying that this is a bad deal don't vote for their board of directors for our we can't ever completely escape like the high school popularity votes for Student Council like no don't vote for Becky she's smells like glue I'm the only one that's gonna promise you a pizza every Tuesday so well if you want to I have no just and delivering on that pizza but I will promise it to you well all the principals and all that of course the principle of the matter speaking of delivering what do we think about this clap these class-action lawsuits against Google the project Phi a ques ation is actually pretty serious if this turns out to be true with the way that these phones are monitoring data usage metering what you're paying for and what you're not that if Google was trying to double dip on Wi-Fi sent content where because we'll in project by they bill you per gigabyte whenever you're using LTE whenever you're on a carriers network but you're supposed to have you know that that's supposed to be off when you're on Wi-Fi obviously you're paying for Wi-Fi or you're using a business's Wi-Fi that they're paying for so Google shouldn't be encroaching on that or using that as the metric for how much data you use if we think that this could be a serious allegation do we think this is why maybe Google did their price Protection Plan recently making them a little bit more competitive against normal carriers or t-mobile did the same it did like a pre-emptive kind of thing going on to when it's a class-action lawsuit no it's not class-action it's just a lawsuit but single file lawsuit in any case the bill protection thing I do think is kind of a recoil reaction to it in terms of the key because the only grounds that I would see Google even remotely tried argue this on is because of its Wi-Fi assistance because the way it would jump from you know LTE to a public Wi-Fi thing automatically is the Wi-Fi system that was wasn't it already a need of feature on the pixel and the even some of the Nexus is the 5x and 6p cuz that was one of the features that they introduced before projects I came on I'm not sure if this has become so like a feature that is be marketed as exclusive or something the only way that I would see it as a you know if Xfinity mobile you know owned by Comcast hello right and we have probably some million the player entering the market from like a DISH Network's cell phone competitor now is going but you know he actually owned those hotspots they actually own the connections whereas the this is just public access and their if they're only doing like charging for the mechanism to which you're connected automatically to a public thing it's kind of ridiculous and yeah it's not very fun and then also I'll be curious to see if there's any traction on this microphone issue I've not been impressed with audio hardware on Google phones and this is coming in from the p-n weekly hashtag Peter Hayden on Twitter in relation to pixel audio I have I heard the sound on hi Mary vadas review of the two XL thinking of mics has this lawsuit come too late I feel really bad audio in caps really bad audio is an issue it should be given more attention what do you think and you I mean me being the audio nerd on this team you know I'm gonna say yes this all makes it better but this was one of the primary reasons we returned our original smaller pixel to it was we found out the hard way that the mics didn't work when shooting video and this is already bad because the pixel shoots video like the iPhone where it's mono audio only which is really disappointing for such an expensive device problem here was that in the cases of these select customers because you know the faults has been demonstrated to be a replicable or at least widespread more widespread than a typical kind of one percent issue where it only affects one percent of the population but the thing was is that the the soldering to the audio codec was poorly done and therefore we experienced some of them experienced crackling peaking a speaker audio and some of them experienced the microphones not working at all as in is it not just for video as it not at all meaning that they gain that I can't make calls or acts I mean we really own anymore I mean all the kids are doing the what's happened and the the Pinterest now I'm pretty sure that's how everybody's talking these days exactly no yeah we all use Bluetooth headphones and whatnot totally like in and in the snapchats I hear that's a that's different than making a phone call so you would do that instead so yeah I mean in this and it's not just because this was an issue that Google didn't acknowledge Google did acknowledge it but they fast around with a whole bunch of customers in between multiple RMA units and just having the warranty run out and when they could have gotten a better deal out of this whole mess it's a it's that's that's their claim that's the that's the class action going on there they're trying to get as many class members as possible they are looking at at least 100 and at least five million dollars of damages going on here which I'm sure every pixel one owner will receive a whopping 37 cents once the the lawyers and everything is sorted it out and what's the lawyers take their cut I'd actually be kind of curious if folks out there especially folks who have a first generation pixel if you guys were affected by any of this drop us a comment hit that Twitter use the p-n weekly hashtag or or also just sort of broader in general the notion of really premium and premier gadgets and devices these are coming with ever inflating price tags and yet we still seem to encounter really obnoxious QA problems you know really obnoxious consistency problems these are the things that were supposedly paying for when we're investing in a nicer gadget what do you guys think if this is actually gonna move the needle on the industry or have cell phones just become so commoditized that this is now just what we have to expect for progress for phones to iterate this quickly we'll take the compromise of phones which don't perform as advertised or are inconsistently manufactured hit us up I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on this if we get some good comments we'll we'll chat them out towards the end of the show we definitely need to unpack this t-mobile story though because this is beyond just like you know oh no they throttled my YouTube's and made me watch standard definition video this actually has some real security implications so this kind of scam the poor doubt thing has been going on for a good while I heard the news some sort of case where 18 t account was compromised they just they could just go in not ask vague questions or answer the questions vaguely or just good like somehow manipulate the the representative on the call just made that that I think get little pieces of information and eventually they wriggle their way into that cow and do whatever they please with head ends with a phone number being used for two-factor authentication or for SMS authentication or for whatever it's a key to plenty of accounts that count itself has plenty of information that you can extract from and in the case here with mr. Carlos Tappan of Washington State apparently his three phones his wife's his daughters at his own were wiped of data and then afterwards he found out that AT&T had their accounts it took them a little while to get them worked back in but Tappan actually was during the time that his account was compromised he lost access to his accounts from Oh mais go and bit connect a couple of crypto countries but the whole thing amounted to about three Bitcoin and at the time of the lawsuit or the other time of the incident which was November last November it was worth about $20,000 yeah and at its peak around a Christmas or so it was worth as much as fifty five thousand dollars so he could I mean he missed out from all this just because t-mobile apparently didn't have enough of the security that he needed in order for an you know to prevent this kind of scam recently they've been notifying customers to set up a dedicated poured out pin so that they can protect themselves right at that step actually have that pin set up though isn't that was a general account access pin you know what you use to it Nexus that counts and do commit to actions whereas this this would be right before oh I'm going to switch alright we'll need your pin for that so yeah I'll be curious to see what t-mobile's response here I think the the escalating security concerns on how much we live our lives through mobile accounts small pocketable computers this this thing is you know obviously we're gonna see an increase in this type of data trafficking which means that we're gonna see an increase in the bad actors out there that want to find novel ways of gaining access especially when they can they can hard target hit people on individual issues and you know it's it's not going to be as scary excuse me it's not going to be as scary as when there's like an industry-wide exploit that can be leveraged very very easily but I think there's still enough money for taking the amount of time to individually target consumers like this I'm not entirely sure what t-mobile can do to make this situation better how do you safeguard and account data to a point where you really trust that an outsider can't get in but you also don't make it ridiculously painful for the consumer to get in or change information or update information it's like as soon as you have some kind of point of access that's that's a point of failure and you know company like t-mobile has a lots of points of access which means they have lots of points of failure yeah I mean well I mean there are different ways where in which the encryption comes in to savior but and in this case the only encryption that you get is hey what was that what was my name again it was a it's a double view is it and there's like this little they start playing like what was I who was the guy did it was a crossing over that terrible sci-fi show with the with its crossing Jordan no not crossing Jordan crossing Jordan was an okay show I think what's crossing over like basically a guy who goes out there and does his Vegas act like oh I sense someone in the audience I'm getting the letter R is are someone and you're like if you just do that to a t-mobile employee who's maybe making a buck over minimum wage like yeah you'll you'll probably be able to get into anyone's account again the social engineering yeah we all know this we all know like you watch a movie scene and someone's hacking and they're typing frantically on a keyboard way more hacking is more about social engineering and unraveling someone's behavior than it is hacking the hardware that the the unraveling the encryption on the mainframe like that's not that's not the way more is done on a bed with a box of pizza next to you and you're trying to figure out what's going on with this hash and then you just give up for the night and sleep on the box of pizza and and and like like your super fancy with pizza I was gonna make a joke about like pizza rolls you know yeah that would be better a scattering of like 3/4 eaten pizza rolls he really just hates that last little crunchy crust bite he can't stand it so he leaves that on the side he's watching his carb intake but all there is it you really wants to like get that gooey Center out of every single Totino's that he can yeah it's really tricky because once you first microwave a man those things are molten like that is lava in your mouth right there but you know he needs his he needs its hacker fuel along with his Mountain Dew Code Red and that's exactly not the image I think we should be trying for a KERS because now they're gonna wreck my ass are not wanted by Totino's nor are we sponsored by Mountain Dew Code Red or passers difference you're upon surd by hackers so well okay great a real quick we do have one here from renato Laporte p and weekly those are two tweets come in and how can number porting be so easy have you either here you either need physical access to the sim to provide the sim number or you need to confirm with an SMS further your old provider will notify you by mail and SMS and the whole process takes at least 11 days so if asked so if asked a number porting I'll need to wait at least 11 days I'm on prepaid or 30 days went on contract and in the meanwhile I get notified by the old and new provider of the day and time that the number porting will happen now that's that's because I think you're going through those individual points of contact if you can if you can replace someone's user data like if you can impersonate that person and you can switch over some of that communication like oh and hey send my new bill to this address or you know like an you send like some specious address and it's not really a the right thing if you can kind of wedge yourself in there I bet it wouldn't be too hard to intercept some of that communication and verification process yeah my species address would be the address of the transformer that's outside the house over here so I I probably I don't remember what it is now wow that's that's a terrible I was gonna say I'd probably do something like Evergreen Terrace from The Simpsons ever who lived there in Springfield no yeah who lived there because it's Simpson I just forget for your email because it's something something something Evergreen Terrace that's neither I would ever be thinking yeah whether there had been Smithers but then no way walk the street from Gerald Ford and then Gerald Ford just disappeared and was never heard from again in the Simpsons universe but that's that's on say well I think I could do with some steamed hams right about now so we'll take a 30-second break and we'll I'm gonna go watch the over aura borealis in in my kitchen wall listen to this amazing cut of audio from this yes you go do that don't know where to begin check out the Google cloud platform weekly podcast where Google developer advocates Melanie Warrick and mark Mandela and your questions get in the weeds and talk to GCP teams customers and partners about best practices from security to machine learning and more hear from technologists all across Google about trends and cool things happening with our technology click to learn more and subscribe to the podcast at GT o-- / GCP podcast and we are back and ready to do some little little more news as we go along on this show here certainly you know and we've got some topics to discuss for Apple as it goes on in terms of its iPhone battery replacement program for the 6 all the way through the 7 with the SE included and it has reported to Congress to a Senate Subcommittee on its progress saying that demand has been very strong and that's one of the members of the actually the Chairman the Republican John Thune of North Dakota said that Apple may be considering giving rebates out to those who had already gotten an out of warranty battery replacement for $79 and they could be giving $50 rebates to them to reflect the current price the subsidized price of $29 so that might be interesting to look to in the meantime we've got word from Amazon that it is now selling Amazon Prime exclusive phones Android phones that used to have lockscreen hands and wallpapers compromised with promotions nowadays they're not doing that anymore they are charging $20 more but there is still it's still a very hefty discount from the original price and instead you'll just have to deal with Amazon apps more of those services coming in baked into your phone so less intrusive but the reason why they said they're doing this is because of facial recognition that's their peach their lockscreen ads would preclude those features from working so that sort of makes sense right there Carl Pei has taken down some rumors as he is want to do some times he has been a pretty vocal person but especially when it comes to rumors about his company making phones that one less x2 that's not a real thing it's fake news we should be combating it with the civility and I don't know but it would be a sequel to the mid-range phone of 2015 that followed on from the oneplus 2 and it was a one-time-only thing at $249 it was a pretty cool thing too as we have reviewed it with its ceramic back and whatnot but sadly it doesn't seem like we're gonna get that let's talk about something now see how about LG the company has said that it it will be leaving the Chinese market for smartphones apparently a reporter was able to go up to their offices in Beijing and a staffer just said that so it's not surprising we're gonna go that there's a very anti-climatic story there that's what they said it's not surprising given that less than 1% less than 0.1 percent market share that they have in their troubles trying to compete on price where everyone is competing on price including the domestic players so there they're just looking there were wounds at this point and one of the other industries that is licking their wounds is the the fabricators of CDs DVDs those kinds of things because Best Buy has announced or it reportedly announced this is a through billboard here that's they are dropping CD inventory from July first and that target also looking towards moving to a consignment model where the owners design the suppliers to take care of the inventory and whatnot and they would only pay the suppliers per sale so this is a this is a weathers last gasps aver that the CD will have in our retail space for now especially as vinyl comes up and streaming dominates Oh talk about that we should we should probably save that though what excuse me I my beef jerky snack during the ad break is coming back to make itself heard during our podcast I want to get back to the absolutely because one of the things it's just sort of a throwaway comment that a lot of news outlets are putting out there is that Apple is already facing 50 class-action lawsuits directly related to the battery battery throttling situation I really don't feel that this story is resonating with general consumers I think it's something that tech fans have been talking about a lot but it doesn't seem to have significantly impacted disrupted or even just cracked into the general mindshare on sort of the general populace I with with some of these stories like Sumer or about us or about Apple or what well but that's kind of what I'm trying to unravel is like at what point do we care this kind of goes back to that question that I threw out there about the perception of the smartphone market and the commoditization of the smartphone and now we all just sort of have accepted certain kinds of lobster potting compromises that seem to get worse over time not better but you know we're still buying these things and we're still supporting certain companies because they're our team I'm wondering what it would if if Apple goes through this process of offering up rebates is it's probably just gonna be some jenkki little press release on the back pages of the Apple website where someone would have to know about it through some other means look it up search for it dig through the website fill out some really obnoxious paperwork serial numbers date of purchase proof of purchase and then try and get some kind of receipt back from when they got the battery replacement in the first place which no one's gonna do or very few people are gonna do for the $50.00 that they stand to potentially get back from it just seems like it seems like kind of a non gesture from Apple's perspective I think back when Apple was announcing their profits or the no not profits uh the jobs 20,000 new jobs in the because of the tax cuts they there was some characterization maybe in the ABC News interview or something that some something like that but Jim Koch may be one the analysts that they had on was saying that this was the battery replacement period and it was kind of a olive branch or like something something gracious on Apple's part that they were offering it wasn't because you know this was you know a thing that could have damaged or maybe is damaging their brand is damaging sales in some respects so well I I seriously doubt it is especially just because when we look at traditional media I had to reach out to my contact at Fox and the producer I work with thought it was hilarious but when this story was first reported and it was only reported sort of in the initial batch of disclosure that came out one of the one of the actual like hard-hitting investigative journalists at Fox 11 she had you could tell she had very little understanding of what was going on and just kept talking about how Apple was throttling the battery and just kept repeating that phrase over and over and over again like you know they're slowing down the battery they're throttling the battery a lot of people are gonna be upset about that no one wants their battery to be throttled no one wants their battery slowed down it's like you had one job it's like it's like saying they're slowing you down the water and like like the water is being slowed down but that it was completely nonsensical that was the level of traditional media coverage that we got in Southern California I know some other outlets probably handled it better local news people there were probably some people who handled it better some people who didn't talk about it at all because it's geeky stuff but yeah that was emblematic of one the nation's largest media markets and that's how they were talking about this issue you know any consumer who saw that and you're like oh you know my boater is gonna slower used to charge really fast you know like that's not that wasn't what the problem was and and so knowing that there's a woefully under educated base of consumers out there and and to their credit it's that they want a product that's going to be easy to use and that just sort of fits into their lifestyle and they don't have to think about managing that product too often if we wonder about the reason yeah there's like oh my battery's slow I don't care as long as you fix it and make sure that it's a whatever slow is fast again well and then but it's also like this I feel like if Apple is in earnest trying to repair some of the ill-will that this is caused they need to be proactive in reaching out to consumers you've got all of the records of customers who shopped through genius stores and got excuse me got products and got batteries replaced I would want to see at you know like I think it would be probably 2 grand a gesture of Apple right now because they're not a magnanimous company they're a corporation that exists to create as much value for shareholders as they can what I would want to see them do is contact all of those customers that supplied email addresses if not that then some sort of public posting on a major page of the Apple website I would want to see them publicly disclosed this was the problem this was our communication we're owning it and this is how we're gonna fix the problem I'm really not impressed so far with the little dance we're doing with oh no this was for the consumer benefit because it really does need to be disclosed at some point that there is no expectation of your multi hundred two thousand dollar product being able to last more than a year and not face severe instability shutdowns slowdowns without wrecking the performance of the device that needs to be front and center for every discussion we have about Apple now they in the bare minimum battery to last you the day when the phone is brand new and they haven't addressed this publicly to any great degree while still maintaining this public image of this company in this brand being you know so user friendly so consumer friendly so so easy to use it just works they get so much goodwill from the the carry over days of Apple's brand reputation that this should be a bigger deal in the general populace I want to move to Australia not because Telus or not Telus Telstra or Optus or any good but because of the Australian Consumer Law which says that you've you know if you're the consumer is entitled to your refund if the project doesn't last for a typical you know for a typical life cycle and you know they base it off of industry figures of but like this is you know there's a lot of there are a lot more protective aspects to it so that you know consumers aren't fobbed off by the manufacturer or the store or the seller like there's and we wouldn't be we wouldn't have to deal with all this yeah I we definitely need to change some part of this conversation I think one of the things that's been most frustrating is the geek side of this has been devalued what with tech being so prolific in the consumer space is becoming more of a lifestyle conversation to be fair geeks are intolerably frustrating to converse with you know like we're not always the easiest people to to engage with but this is precisely why we need to be leading these kinds of conversations and making sure that we're being inclusive really trying to draw people in and and not engaging in as much schadenfreude over Apple's brand reputation as we probably want to be more trying to handle the concern for our friends and family who are getting a raw deal and and approaching that is going to be really sensitive because you have that backfire effect you know someone has sort of a dogmatic relationship with a brand and geeks are certainly guilty of this too but someone has that dogmatic relationship with a brand there here information that runs counter to their assertions even if it's good evidence they're going to actually recoil farther away from that new information then then if you can join the conversation in a way that's less confrontational speaking of geeks my relationship with consumer brand Amazon I thought you were gonna skip Amazon and go to one plus because one plus I think is the perfect a geek brand we followed a brand regardless of whatever evidence that brand is likely to show them you're right let's talk about Amazon first though yeah no I wanted that was the part of the joke but I'm happy I'm certainly happy that we're seeing fewer ads or at least you know not having to deal with them as obtrusively as they used to be for what hundred dollars lists aren't like 20% off the price of a usual phone it's just gonna be a little bit more smoother we'll actually be able to use a feature that was intended by the OEM on the phone like it's gonna be I know I this is a really good look for Amazon right now because this is a Amazon as an organization is going to face some some optics problems coming up soon Jeff Bezos being so ridiculously wealthy and valuable in terms of the company stock and his own earnings while also looking at stores that are probably gonna start laying off cashiers for automated Amazon systems to do check out the whole job pocalypse is gonna be you know fueled in part by Amazon innovation and we also as a society need to come to grips with how do we value labor and human dignity when it's it shouldn't necessarily always be just a fixed to a straight dollar amount that you can generate through your labor or through your I mean there isn't into an Amazon ghost or have you seen what we'd look like in those cameras where we're we're kind of dancing around and looking at objects and determining the value of them and I can't say that I have jewels I'm familiar with the dancing in an Amazon ghost or so but but this this this is a step that I actually do want to say thumbs up because I think we're starting to get the early indications that the next phase of online services can't be built in just a dumb advertising model anymore I don't think that's going to be the future of monetizing content I think YouTube is learning this lesson the hard way and is pissing off a humongous part a a hunk of their user base in the process Amazon is probably looking at these metrics and saying you know for what ad revenue we might engage with or what services people might sign up for if we charge $20 more for the phone we're gonna balance that out as opposed to keeping people signed up on Amazon Prime that Amazon Prime is the bigger draw for Amazon then making sure someone is constantly aware of ads in their general sphere of influence frankly speaking I mean we're talking about prime exclusive phones they were available they are available excuse me only to those who have an Amazon Prime subscription does that ninety nine dollars a year that you pay and Amazon is encouraging you to buy more products that generate more revenue than just an ala carte service which you already have access to prime music crime movies like you can it's they're like all they've done for you is just make the app appear on the thing automatically as opposed to you having to download it and but that's where most of the revenue has come from and with that out of the way their largest revenue generator for something that's arguably kind of like human pro-human you can say that then I'm wondering where they might be able to squeeze in another kind of thing that might be able to encourage sales or prod them long well but that's and I think that that goes hand in hand with this this change in philosophy you weren't getting you you weren't getting the ad impact on someone who was already a prime subscriber by jacking their their lockscreen that wasn't the big value-add keeping them in the prime ecosystem is way better from a monetary standpoint then potentially losing someone to a competing product or a competing service and so now we've got these offers on phones which generally have very very competitive pricing like looking at the LG G 6 plus on Amazon Prime that's a that's a that's a decent deal for a reasonably powerful phone right in that mid range er territory against other competitors like there is an idea there that that works really well so you get them to buy that phone which comes preloaded with Amazon services this to me speaks of a future tactic that Microsoft is probably going to be engaging in don't try and fight Android instead make Android full of Microsoft services so you sell you you have that licensing deal with Samsung Samsung's are being sold in Microsoft stores and come pre-loaded with Microsoft services you know this is the one part of Microsoft that is like absolutely dominating still and still finding growth at the same time is keeping people invested in the Microsoft software ecosystem don't try and fight a hardware war you can't battle you can't win so that this this I think is going to be a really interesting take on the next-gen of services is what can google do to provide a value-add first service like YouTube you know you you want to keep people invested watching content streaming content and trying to monetize that has proven an uphill battle and even more difficult proposition in this era of super popular YouTube channels engaging in abject douchebaggery you know like you're gonna scare off advertisers well that's Google's bread-and-butter getting people to pay for ads but how do you leverage that against people who don't watch ads and Facebook is trying to figure this out too at the same time saying like oh no buy an ad so that all the people will know about your product but ads couldn't possibly affect political campaigns ads aren't effective for for that you know like you know every single company that built their service uncool put it out for free and is now trying to find a way to monetize we're gonna see radically decreasing benefits to making consumers interact with advertising to try and fund your cool service all right you talked about a war that you can't win is that right so I've met Carl pay in real life a couple of times he seems very determined or with me again is that is that what we're getting at very civil with him when it comes to Twitter when it comes to social media he is like a wall you can't get things you know a cry you know blasts you can't blast things through him without talk okay so they're big rumors about a 1 plus X 2 as I've talked about and be a mid-range sequel to the 1 plus X and there were like spec rumors about the snapdragon 835 as I say I haven't looked into you the source rumor material but what got my attention was Karl pays retweets of the story and then he just says nope and then he goes on to crusade about fake news is a huge threat to human civilization let's all do our part in stopping it and the third goes on you know claims about him denying the 1 + 3 T before it was launched or something like that maybe could have been talking about the 1 plus 3s but letters ready hashtag fake news hashtag click baits blah blah blah please make a compact 5-inch 2x1 handsets oneplus device sizes at getting out of hand Karl pay grow bigger hands so I mean he's a he's a he's a force to be reckoned with Joker I you know so so here's the thing I mean getting into the to the meat of the rumor I really hope that one plus does not try another X experiment I think you already have a messaging problem with the no compromises never settling device that's supposed to come in at a much lower price point you you can't you can't extend that conversation back down into a phone that's purposely designed to have compromises to meet certain price tiers this this is this it didn't work for the X and I know the other people are complaining like oh well the X never got nougat and like maybe if it got if you've gotten those software updates that was out of oneplus as control I don't know that any Qualcomm 801 series phones got got updates to nougat because of issues with kernels and Google and programmers and developers but this is where the company needs to focus they need to kind of keep a very clean brand message going especially if they're trying to pivot mainstream and a one device strategy that sort of land smack dab in the middle of the smartphone market Park it place price is I think the safest way for them to go I think if they diversify and they try and do too much then they're probably gonna make everyone unhappy not all will will have products to you know entice more customers I don't think those those products will be as well built or as well supported I don't even think the tea should like exist it should be just blood device if you have to wait until November to launch it then go ahead but I kinda like that as an idea I don't think they're executing that idea very well is because they don't have multiple phone lines and they they're trying again remember a lot of this is that emotional branding right they're trying to get you to have an emotional relationship with the company because I mean all things being equal there are numerous solutions for having a smartphone today whatever draws you in is likely going to be an emotional response first and then you'll go back and rationally justify why you want to do business with that company I think there's something really cool about the conversation of them saying tech iterates and cycles quickly and so we are going to put out two phones a year but they're gonna be the same phone it's just there's always going to be a refresh so if you're at this point of the year if you jump in now you're you'll be getting the best tech that we can get our hands on because that's gonna change very rapidly over a period of about six months we're gonna give it a refresh coming in here so that way you never really feel like your phone is like three years out of date it's depending on when you get in and depending on when you decide to rebuy buy in for a new phone you know that you'll be pretty close to whatever is bleeding-edge at that time I think the problem is is they're trying to operate with secrecy as if these are so such new and different devices that are coming out though the five the five T oh it's fresh it's new it's exciting that it's going to make people who buy in at the first half of the year feel like like they're getting the bad device that's that that to me is just a problem of brand perception I think if they were more proactive and more forthright in the conversation because the customers would know like I'm getting the best possible device that one could buy today because if you wait you can always get a better device it doesn't matter what manufacturer you wait six months better phones will come out you know there is there is a qualitative difference in like Galaxy s8 to Galaxy Note 8 and you know part of that is just getting a newer version of Android and better understanding of how to optimize for the hardware that Samsung built so I think if oneplus could join the conversation that way there'd be a lot less ire over these you know these refreshes every six months if specially if it wants to be a mainstream brand toad but those tumors aren't gonna follow that our consumers aren't gonna piece that together on their own you're gonna have to spoon-feed general consumers and no way carriers are gonna want to support those kinds of SKUs they're gonna want the one oneplus phone that they can put up in display case they're not gonna want to jump through these types of branding shenanigans unless one-plus already comes with a growing user base that are demanding that phone alright let's get to our in memoriam parts I'm not sure if that's all but yeah so Best Buy Target they're not playing around CDs anymore digital downloads or even going down the drain and they're open rumors about iTunes that music store going away although Apple's denied it it's a dude you can tell that physical media especially the laserdisc now that's not right but people compact that's that's later laser-etched and can store up to four point seven gigabytes of media on it I think that's for a DVD or something like that era CD dude CD was 750 megabytes is that 750 megabytes mm and he had those right speeds I never really understood like what was 8 x or sit down with a big deal back in the day I remember when I got my first CD burner and I splurged on the the faster it was I think it was an 8 speed CD burner you actually had to make sure the media was compatible because if you tried to burn too fast it would like it would like corrupt the data in the burn when it would fail and you'd have to throw out one of these preciously expensive shiny reflective you know coasters whatever CD is made of because like beyond the chrome and varnish I don't know like what the medium actually is I mean it's it's a it's plastic with with a light reflective substance now CDs that were that were finished for distribution in music the the zeros and ones are on a medium that is that is pretty well permanent like a metal substrate I believe the CD burner I believe actually had an ink like layer that the laser would then disrupt the patterns in the ink to create the zeros and ones I'm grossly oversimplifying the technology of the CD because it is it is a little bit more complicated than that but that's a sense this is up I think how totally and and I mean it's not like there's ink in a CD I just mean it's it's it's sort of like a you know like like a hole punch like process and so it is a different material than what a finished music CD resembled but yeah III think it's kind of interesting there there's something so organic and tactile like I need to go and get a new turntable my turntable actually died last year and it was a cheap turntable so it wasn't like I was super sad but there's something so so tactile and so organic about the needle drop on vinyl when you want to listen you you want to sit down and you want to listen to music not just have music sound tracking another activity like I'm not gonna put on a record to go and then work out that that it's hilarious that has well eclipsed the the convenience of the CD like you don't want the CD for that organic listening experience that's way less convenient than just listening to mp3s I'll be curious to see if in this digital space since people don't seem to be as concerned about owning digital files of their music as much as streaming if we'll ever get back to some idea of having an archival quality digital file that people own if you really love this album and you want to save the absolute best highest quality version of it there aren't marketplaces that that really fully take advantage of the audio playing capabilities on modern mobile hardware let alone you know like high-end stereo equipment still seems kind of focused more on the enthusiast sector of people who listen to vinyl yeah what do you think about that anyways because like it in the same breath of news that we got we're best by saying that they're dropping their CD stock on July 1st they're apparently going to keep on selling records with turntables for the next couple of years well a major problem with with digital like hardware digital was we never got that marketing quality bump you know like we went from DVDs to blu-rays I mean laserdisc to DVD to blu-ray especially moving from VHS to DVD that was a huge jump CDs stayed at sort of a basic Redbook 1644 one you know like that that that never really improved we had sa CD and DVD a that fought a format war that no one cared about when again if you hadn't had that format war holding back the innovation of a higher quality standard you could have been marketing the crap out of that to people who fancy themselves audio files whether or not you believe that there's any benefits 24-bit audio I do believe there is a benefit to archival quality like where you take that 24-bit file and you you you know you make a flak out of it or you make a high quality mp3 out of it for convenience but then you always have that amazing source file to go back to and as the industry improves or there are better audio playing capabilities and phones or in media players or Bluetooth headsets maybe someday becomes super great you can always go back to the source to make whatever new format the industry might be utilizing mqa looks like that might be another potential benefit for super high quality but low impact like a low low streaming that that compression seems like it's gonna be a boon for the industry so they've completely missed out on iterating you know how do you get someone to rebuy a CD it sounds pretty much good enough so you needed to make that emotional argument again I like everything about this week it's the week before Valentine's Day it's all about it the emotion the feelers you needed to make that you needed to make someone feel like their CD wasn't good enough just like going from DVD to blu-ray you did see some quality some some video quality benefits that HD that's super fancy but for a lot of folks out there especially before HD TVs were as commonplace we're buying blu-rays like on the future of what what kind of TV they might own after their current you know standard definition TV man you talk about svcd versus dvd-a I only remember a DHD DVD and blue-ray like that that was the big friend of my time so yeah we had we had these formats and they were better copy protected I mean the music industry wanted a more locked up format you couldn't just rip him like he could CDs although that would have changed if they had found any any kind of traction and I you know I really wanted to like experiments like what was that was a upon yo oh yo what was that third funky yeah not on key oh I can't remember it was I think it was was it Neil Diamond this is terrible podcasting but I'm actually going to look for yeah players yo Neil Diamond Joe it was it like a who knows it was pono completely wrong but I was pretty close yeah so I mean that never materialized titles super high quality audio doesn't seem to be much of a draw to anyone but there is something and it's probably mostly psychosomatic but I pulled some there are some sample sites that have like really high quality and QA rips of like orchestral music and I plugged in it's not like I own super super expensive audiophile headphones I mean right now my go-to open-back headphones are just a pair of Sennheiser 599's which are expensive but they're not like you know like Shores $3,000 electrostatic earbuds or anything like that but I'll plug those 599's into an LG V 30 and fire up this mqa track and it feels different than anything else that I've listened to from like mp3s and decent earbuds like it expands on the audio and the music in a way that just feels so much nicer again could be all in my brain just because I know what I'm doing and I know what I like and so I might just be you know kind of you know circus my realize though how many ones and zeros are coming in through each meeting like yeah but that's the crowd what's exciting about mqa is because mqa is giving us like audio audio quality that scientifically resides in like the 32-bit audio space but in a in a format that it would be much easier to stream like what title was trying to do with with a 24-bit 24-bit masters to download onto people's devices mqa could give us you know spotify super high quality you know anyone who who fancies himself that audiophile great listener or ears that can really discern these types of nuances though that's probably not true the you know the the color and dynamic range and spatial separation and all these things that we say we care about when we were trying to be discerning music listeners mqa could deliver at a much smaller file size to make the the streaming the bandwidth requirements much lower and that could be really exciting now if anyone can explain to me the concept of computing via a tape cassettes I I can't really help you with that I I only had five and a quarter floppies I never had a tape deck I always want ever had that they were a Commodore you never had I I went straight to das I was on an 80 88 man and and we splurged for not only dual floppy drives but dual floppy drives and a hard drive we had kilobytes of built-in storage bra you don't even know it was lit 256 kilobytes I mean who could store I mean that's that's like that's like a quarter of the Library of Congress if you have no pictures [Laughter] probably not even trying to remember all the Wikipedia like archives like you could archive the whole Wikipedia and you just stuff it into a little USB disk and go away and then sometimes you know if you need if you need your Wikipedia you can just hey I'll just pull this up I'll just plug it into my laptop okay but it is now it's in a completely you not friendly to use format but I can just ctrl F the terms that I need right well and uh we do have a tweet here from Renato Laporte hashtag pn wiki hashtag P and weekly ya 24-bit vinyl rips are the best I wished this was a thing you could legally buy instead of having to look on on the bays yeah whatever torrents I file transferring site you might use I I've been sort of creating and collecting my own I've got a Radiohead rip that again it's a little noisier because my turntable wasn't super great but it's warm and it's fat and it's really well mixed and Radiohead took the time to deliver a great vinyl transfer because you can't mix for vinyl like you can for for digital like you can't you can't overload the bass or you can't overly compress the audio because you know it'll just punch through the side wall of the record like it's it's a really unique listening listening experience and I cut my vinyl rip I did it 24 96 and then I of course I danced ample dit to mp3 so I could easily store it on on my phones at the time but I'll I can always go back to that 24-bit rip and that was the very first time I dropped the needle on that record I captured the the exact first listen in its most pristine format because every time you listen to a record it degrades slightly it's you know I've got that that very first needle drop captured you know that that's an experience I don't know how to properly convey that if you're not really into music or you're not really into this kind of stuff like that's special feels like music feeling special again not just being completely disposable speaking of well I want to see if we can like do experimental track where you just have the bass all the way up and then it you can have all the the freaking need I'll skip all the way down to the end of the like that also grows I mean we could it would be a really expensive experiment that we know will end in abject failure very good we could do it I'm sure yeah yeah maybe I mean something you me let's go let's uh whenever I head to LA little retro studio and then we'll be able to get our Strandberg out and yeah and we'll have to do we'll have to record everything on like classic vintage ribbon mics and then unlike for track tape machines now the only we do it is through a five pound of british five-pound note like we take the plastic but that has been done okay I'm done unaware you kown up a five-pound note and then then you can actually play it too you can actually put it down on a track it's amazing well but all of that notwithstanding CDs dying there's something that makes there's some idea in the back of my head that makes me feel I should be sad about this but I'm really not like as a physical medium I wanted to see it evolve and it never did just like we got DVD and then blu-ray and then HD and then quad HD or I mean all tricky we never got that same that same like arms race in an audio to really try and improve the consumer experience so it's fine it can go away let's safe to argue that it never will so good riddance good riddance and we don't need that much disposable plastic in our lives anymore we should probably speaking of disposable plastic and things that are much better when you stream them we should probably wrap up the show with one more one more sneak from our sponsor this week because they're not making you buy CDs to listen to their awesome content no in fact we're gonna talk about them at the end of the show like afterwards like I thought we were gonna do I thought we were gonna do that just before the the rap out it's not a baseball people n roll's and his like literally end of the end row haha I misread our sheet on how this show is going to go so folks uh there you have it another episode of the baguette now weekly has come and gone we did a pretty good job trying to survive that thing I think so no I think I think it worked out really well and not only did it work out well for our show but if you want to continue conversing on these topics you can hit us up on the Twitter's where Jules is at point Jules and I'm humbly at some gadget guy pocket now is around the web pretty much anywhere you can find cool tech media journalism but of course you'll want to check out our home site pocketnow.com and es pocketnow.com for Spanish speakers the shows like this cannot exist without your support sharing the weekly with your friends who love mobile technology and by dropping reviews on iTunes stitcher Google Play and wherever podcast reviews can be left and once again we do want to thank this week's sponsor you could check out Google cloud platform podcast definitely give their show Alishan a listen if you're into that kind of IT and tech but ultimately there wouldn't be a shell if it weren't for our listeners and subscribers who have kept us on the air since 2012 the pocket now weekly we'll be back next week with all kinds of delicious technology goodness so make sure you tune back in looking to move to the cloud check out the Google cloud platform weekly podcast where Google developer advocates answer questions get in the weeds and talk to experts customers and partners about GCP click to learn more and subscribe to the podcast at gqo slash GCP podcast