Gadgetory

it turns out Apple is slowing down your old iPhone as the battery ages facing a class-action lawsuit how should Cupertino respond magic leap is jumping into the augmented reality space with some new goggles and the pocket now staff playing a silly Secret Santa round with our favorite smartphones of the air we've got a lot to talk we've got a lot to talk about so make sure you're charged and ready for episode two eight four of the pocket now weekly recorded December 22nd at 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 the beginning of your holiday break was filled with limitless possibilities I'm Juan Carlos back now senior editor at pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. Jules Wong out on the East Coast how's it going buddy boy you can sled down that hill or toboggan down that hill or I don't know I mean it was a nice time back when I had there was it was when my dad was stationed in Massachusetts it was my all-time favorite there was this one hill on uh what was it it was at Hanscom Hanscom Air Force Base that's gonna yeah yeah that there's one hill that was amazing for sledding and the entire the entire base kids we would all go and and like practically break limbs and snap spines like Altoids conquer and I mean that's a picturesque town itself it's pretty neat it's lovely you get the crisp feeling in the air it's and there's something and there's something like dastardly that happens with snowfall in Massachusetts I'm sure on a lot of East Coast borders but like every winter we would get this amazing mixture of like it getting just warm enough during the day to melt so you'd get this like ice no ice no ice no layer that was phenomenal for injuring yourself but then also Ferb's you know I mean it was really it's just one winter thing and then sooner or later the snow turns brown you have to walk through trudged there in the streets dude yeah everything's coming so it's just not really it's super great the salt I do kind of miss seasons but that's the thing that's also really nice about grow I you know having my home in Albuquerque it's like you get the mildest version of every season so like you snowfalls in in New Mexico and there's just not enough moisture so it's like this really nice dusting this light misting of snow over everything and and then the next day it's gone yeah drive to your seasons you have to drive yeah it's it's pretty rough let me tell you this I think California it got down to like I think it's it's currently like just under 70 degrees so it's it's akin to freezing here are those weird benchmarks for weather down there that's weird well anyways we're glad that you have decided to join us here for our journey our audio journey our video journeys to some extent on this week's podcast and we invite you to talk to us talk with us get the conversation going especially as we get towards some of the more controversial topics here going to Twitter and type in the hashtag p-n weekly and you'll be able to follow the conversation as well as contribute your own comments albeit read them respond to them live on the air at 3 p.m. Eastern on this 22nd of December yeah whoo that Christmas thing going on in a few days anyways if you want to send something along for we're still doing that then technically next week is still the last oh yeah I know next week is going to be remembered at you yeah issue okay we've got a magazine I'm already on vacation brain so this is gonna be a fun show I can feel it already oh yeah definitely podcast at pocketnow.com if you want to throw in a letter into that bag but in the meantime it's pianned weekly hashtag on Twitter and already on the peon weekly hashtag this is from hey is for David last week we were talking a little bit about different AI in sort of home automation products and hey is for David rights I believe the AI showcased in the Samsung washing machine is Cortana and that was debuted at Eva with the launch of the Galaxy Tab pro as I had to look it up it was called cue Raider and so it wasn't fixed for you like we were stumbling around last week when we had a TK babe on the show Samsung's different AI for washing machines is curator so you can get a Samsung washing machine that knows more about your clothes than you do has all the dirt on your dirty yeah I'm not sure if Laura Kwok Crofts just kind of come in and do that but hey it sounds like it sounds like an AI gone wrong right cue Raider and then it takes over you know your your mission base and won't let you out of the airlock and it won't open the pod bay doors and it's basically just locks your all your laundry in a tomb and you have to find a way to get to it you have to read I am a green light that movie Jules I think that needs to be seen by more than the people who just watch or listen to our podcast I married a green night balloon the news if you're ready to talk about this is actually a pretty decent news week what do you got what are you drinking over there another W they don't tell God cast alcohol not yet I'm not there yet give it a couple days the Rugrats on Christmas break and maybe I'll need something to numb for next week but she's doing okay right now well for the week of December 18 2017 this is all the news that's fit to podcast we'll start off this roundup with some news about the iPhones of the future of 2019 Apple has historically never Overland old in providing big batteries for its devices and some might argue that it doesn't have to because the iPhones very power efficient we'll get to that in just a second but new projections out from JGI securities claim that we should expect to see an upgrade in 3d sensing and a are related functions those that sort of equipment excuse me will likely tax the power cells more if we could see to compensate the year after next now there's another argument about Apple and batteries growing up the company hasn't admitted to slowing down older iPhones like the success and seven after third-party testing showed performance throttling it stayed to TechCrunch that the iOS 11 update brought stricter processing limits to the iPhone 6 and iPhone se as well I have said at one point to you that is to prolong the life of the devices as the lithium-ion batteries start to age that these claims about the devices having the potential to hit performance peaks that they could not happen well that's they could cause shutdowns and deterioration there are some new ones to be had here and we'll get to that as we go into detail with this magic leak has finally published one and it's out of the app some four kids will be made available in addition to the so-called light wear goggles and objects are detected using light field sensors the product will be available in limited quality in the quantities next year Sony is supposedly producing a new flagship with Qualcomm's latest high power tips at the snapdragon 845 it got a run on in Geekbench and poll numbers as we haven't seen before from any Qualcomm chip said 2400 points on a single core test and 8300 points for the fork or the performance cores as we like to say which can run up to 2.6 like to say the performance cores because the 3gpp eeeh meanwhile third generation partnership or something has reached its expedited goal of creating the first standard for 5g networks this week one more rules will be placed in June next year this paves the way for networks to launch 5g service in late 2018 and afterwards President Donald Trump has just signed a tax reform bill into law after much wrangling between republican-controlled House and Senate now what does this do you have have to do with mobile technology well corporations will see their rate drop from 35 percent to 21 percent and big telecoms like AT&T and Comcast are celebrating by announcing new expanded capital expenditure plans each company is also giving out $1,000 holiday bonuses to all of their non-executive employees all together brand 400,000 working their ranks Amazon Tube is one of the latest terms to show up at the US Patent and Trademark Office Amazon indeed is the applicant for that term hinting at everything you can think of for a user submitted video mastered distribution platform it see as the latest salvo to Google's unwillingness to bring YouTube back to the echoes show and to keep it on for fire TV users this controversy stems back to some retaliation for Amazon not stocking some of Google's hardware peripherals finally Microsoft has killed off an application in its Windows Store now why would he want to kill off Google Chrome doesn't everyone want a lightweight version of this resource hog of a web browser well it turns out that the app is the egg users to download the full program and that didn't set out said it all well with Microsoft it would not also not make me any sense at hall's for Google to create a friendlier Chrome Microsoft requires JavaScript and HTML for web rendering read but easy for you to say in its apps while Google uses its own blink engine there are a whole bunch of things that to developing Windows apps for Windows 10 as lightweight thing we'll get to that as we come to it but in the meantime let's talk about the batteries let's talk about iPhones that just can't seem to keep their charge that will require more charge in the future what does this look to you to shape the future of how Apple describes all-day battery life or something like that yeah it's it's because this kind of goes hand in hand what was it two weeks ago or three weeks ago where we were talking about Samsung and their graphene excuse me yeah I probably shouldn't drink diet root beer while I'm trying to podcast because I'm gonna have like turtle burps all the show right here no this kind of goes hand-in-hand with that whenever we see what I think is hilarious is whenever we do see improvements to battery technology I did a video on this like three years before I joined the PocketNow team it's the fallacy of bigger batteries or more improved batteries are gonna deliver longer runtime it's almost always immediately eaten up by more powerful processing more resource intensive apps and we are right at the precipice of that next generation of services especially if we're going to be doing more VR and AR like apples talking about improving the battery capacity or improving the battery runtime or the battery technology is really only going to serve more weighty use you know and what I think is hilarious is like you give someone so like let's say you have a current gen phone and you go from having like a 2,000 milliamp power battery to a four thousand milliamp hour battery what I find really people don't last twice as long they just use their phone twice as much during the day right so even the consumer behavior just very competitive yeah it's just yeah like Jules is on point there because he's sort of locked up and frozen I agree anyways the best live show ever so you know like apples points here especially like trying to anticipate what what this use might look like in 2019 I think also Stan's is a small commentary in like what do we expect the longevity of our phones to be you know I somewhat I Rock Euler iPhone 7 yeah they used to have a pretty good sense of what their phone of what an iPhone how long an iPhone should or would last and and this kind of leads us right into the other story too about Apple now admitting that they reduce performance based on the battery age battery degradation and battery longevity and we have a big problem when it comes to things like disclosure I think that's really almost always a company's biggest fault is instead of getting out ahead of the story instead of what once Inklings of this commentary are starting to make it through larger publications Apple waited until there was like a mountain of evidence against them and then it makes them look like they're withholding it because they are they are withholding a certain aspect of the performance of this phone when they've always you know sort of it in inferred not not inferred insinuated that this wasn't something that they were doing that you know it was just sort of a psychosomatic response to newer software being run on older phones when in reality they were actually changing up the performance of the device and so had this just been disclosed or had consumers been given an option you know like hey your battery will last less but you can have the full performance of the phone and just flick the switch I don't think there'd be an issue here I don't think there would have been a problem but now we're talking about thousand-dollar phones we're talking about top-tier performance we're talking about the next generation of services and Apple needs to be disclosing what it is that people are actually doing with or what's actually happening with the investment that people make in their products well it's also about how much information they want to give and not to feed and see the whole other planned obsolescence narrative that people tend to have about these things but I think tank crunch which was the one that makes a good point here and how much how customers react to this where they want to know just have a set time for a battery placement for their iPhone or something that might not be necessary for the sake of just knowing that performance is gonna be maxed out or something like that where I'm not sure if iOS goes into the nitty-gritty and is able to read into metadata about the battery how old it is and whatnot so there's a lot of implied you know there's a lot of ways that people will think around this situation and they'll take action upon it it might be ill-advised in the end they might not get them more mileage it's just it's just a situation where I don't think consumers can even come up with an ill-advised response to this if they don't have the information that they should I I think that there is something scummy about a business practice where the performance of a product is degraded over time and one way to recover that performance would be to install a very cost-effective new battery as opposed to buying a new phone and these things tend to roll around two-year cycles where Apple will finally disclose what the problems of a phone were we saw this with the iPhone 5 on the iPhone 5 had battery problems and Apple didn't really jump into the discussion or offer consumers who were facing those problems any any outlet until they were right towards the to the end of the two-year lifecycle of that phone and wouldn't you know it well you know instead of getting a new battery for your iPhone 5 you could just buy a new iPhone 6 on a tractor through some sort of payment plan or you just refresh that way wouldn't that just be easier than maintenance insana Noldor phone why not a better chipset that doesn't perform at that level if it has to why doesn't want to just freakin treat its batteries better like theirs well but but even just giving consumers the choice I think there are a number of consumers out there that will understand and they'll opt for degraded performance for longer runtime like the phone runs well enough for me to do my emailing and my twittering what do I need all this horsepower for and then there gonna be some consumers who choose I would rather have the full the full force of this processor even though I know I'm gonna have to charge it up sooner but it's a bad look for this company when people could recover their performance by getting you know by by paying for what I don't even know how much a battery replacement amount on an iPhone costs through the Apple I mean we're talking about everything since the six so including the sick your beloved S II which is kind of slowed down so I mean it's just I mean the two-year limit I mean is should we really commend Apple for going a little bit early on others I broke up in the middle of that so I have no idea what you were trying to ask there Jules even commit should we even tried to commend Apple for going a little bit early on the new work products as well I mean it's just I disclosed I don't think it's even like you know can we say good boy or bad boy Apple it's it's how do we expect this company to do business in the market and how do we expect this company to treat their customers especially as there is no competition for Apple there is no other place you can buy an iPhone you you buy an iPhone from Apple they have a monopoly on the iPhone market if we want to look at it that way and not disclosing this to their consumers I feel as a disservice to their own market and this is also why I used to be so in favor of replaceable batteries on Android phones it wasn't that I would buy extra batteries to swap during the day it would be around a year just as the battery is starting to degrade a little I would put in a fresh new battery and then I'd have a backup battery if I ever really needed it but it was like I got that full charge that full new phone feel all over again by swapping in a new battery and now we can't really do that we can't do that easily these all of these products are now becoming glued shut so Apple you know they've always been on that on that train but there could have been a discussion with their customers hey you're getting the new version of the iOS operating system and your phone battery is two years old for $100 you can refresh the performance of that phone and get you know new battery life and recover the actual CPU processing GPU processing of this phone but they're not going to say that because they want you to go out and buy the new iPhone exactly and it could be just for that sake - that the iOS iOS doesn't even care about the actual battery itself it just slows down regardless you know just because of the age of the phone so we just got a tweet from Jay Pasquale's on using the PN weekly hashtag $79 for the battery replacement 80 bucks I mean your ex that's a decent chunk of change but you know if you wanted your phone to perform snappier and that was the metric that Apple was using in terms of degrading performance 80 bucks is I think totally worth it to refresh an older phone keep it running I get get back to that higher tier of performance prior to the degradation if you want to keep it beyond two and a half three years I mean I know that's that's what's so frustrating is the average ownership is somewhere around 26 or 28 months I think the last time the reasons of why they do it maybe it's because of a necessity or because they just feel comfortable with it but in terms of all that experience that they allow themselves that well not allow themselves to have but you know just being empowered with a little more information that would be altogether much better I agree with that one so definitely listen want to what we're talking about here with more power comes more responsibility comes more higher a number it's not dragon 845 these numbers mean not much to me because they're benchmarks but I mean what do you make of it because you wanted me to you wanted to talk about this dint you oh no I definitely wanted to include it in the news roundup so we're looking at the numbers on the Snapdragon 845 and and I think we're seeing sort of what we would expect from another major processor release depending on what phones were comparing against somewhere around a twenty to thirty percent improvement in these synthetic benchmarks which in real-world performance is probably going to translate to very little but knowing what we know especially from the coverage that I'm a was producing down in in Hawaii for that Qualcomm then this is going hand-in-hand this this sort of piggybacks on the story that we were talking about with apples Apple and batteries is looking at qual comes influence over the android market and knowing that the next generation of services are going to be even more CPU intensive even more graphics intensive we're going to be looking a lot of offloading of special services to independent cores as opposed to just general CPU computing and this is where the a45 really comes into play that 20 to 30 percent performance bump doesn't necessarily mean we're going to be seeing significantly better real-world performance like your your Twitter app is gonna load a fraction of a millisecond faster than it used to instead it's it's this horsepower will eventually be dedicated to services that will really tax current hardware if you caught someone posted just the screenshot of the performance the the was a geek bench the geek bench scores on reddit and in the comments there were hilarious because of course it instantly had to become an Apple versus Qualcomm debate oh my god a 10x fusion total bullcrap out of the MacBook Air and again we should we should always treat synthetic benchmarks for exactly what they are you know it's it's it's a synthetic process it doesn't reflect real world performance it's it's not a one-to-one especially with how phones will alter their performance when they detect the benchmark being run but I don't say that as could be also it's a verified of tube so like this would not be this is in line with what we'll see especially you know Sony getting ahead of the curve we know they're trying going to be trying to make some bigger changes in 2018 off the last generation of this boxy XZ or you know xperia x form factor III feel like this is reflective of what will come to pass but again it's it's always that hilarious debate or that hairy hilarious nerd fight that we see in those kinds of posts where people are just at each other's throats and I think again sort of missing the the bigger picture just the number of people like oh like I care about having slightly faster email performance and you're like well that's not what this is about and if you don't use your phone for anything other than email why are you posting on our Android about a top-of-the-line chipset when like a snapdragon 614 from three years ago would be fine for you because I am on the internet and I have opinion and someone else is on the internet and they're wrong in the in the news bike but I just wanted to circle back real quick Jules what were your thoughts on this magic leap announcement that they're gonna be getting into the actual hardware game with a pair of goggles I thought this was an interesting time for them to to take the wraps off what these things look like um I I I'm not sure myself because first of all this is tailored towards traitors so there you go it's the first look it's the first field I how they coming out but functional enough it doesn't you don't have to look like like you're fashionable like Geordi the five the rifts they all have pretty minion designs so I mean well until we get like actual mesh form replacements kind of visors that can adhere to your face and then you could still have you won't be weird with your eyes like being covered ever let's just show your eyes and why not I can tell we get to that in like 3027 like until then I'm not really sure what the big deal is I'll be curious to see because magically made a whole bunch of noises they had that control interface where you moved your hands around and you could like interact with things on the screen where I was showing up like fruit ninja and stuff like that I'll be curious to see if this was the right time no one really seems to benefit from being first with any kind of new consumer facing technology and I know that they're saying this is going to be more for developers and for creators and for that kind of audience but there this is another example like why I've been frustrated with Microsoft Microsoft has sort of been like their lead in this market showing off hololens and how cool hololens was now that that lead is eroding quickly as phones are adopting you know more AR aspects and developers are really interested in AR core and AR kit now we've got companies putting out hardware and where where is the big player response where is that vibe response or that Microsoft responds mixed reality is really just VR plus it's not really AR or piggybacking off of hololens in the way that we wanted to see real interaction with real world elements I thought it was kind of curious that okay that's that a smaller company like magically I think it's trying to make the play make the headlines get people interested in that even though it's still a ways off from actually shipping but this also seems to reflect just how empty the competition for AR has been since the company that's most responsible for getting people interested in it Microsoft has been super quiet on that front since I think the surface book was at the surface book launch where they showed off that really cool AR game and you have like a shield and bugs would crawl out of the walls and stuff like no it's really followed up since then I mean it all depends on with SDK allows you to do and just being able to interact with I mean you have a dedicated technology for detection of objects of what you know what the do you would hope that processing power.you be able to know to have non body mounted peripherals so that you can actually play around with other things in the room and just have it look awesome and cool I mean I would love to play rocket League in real life I mean and not just you know like have a demo derby but III definitely I don't know how much time we need to spend on this eighteen but one of the things that that that again drives me nuts about this kind of thing is we're talking about a company that I think what pulled in 14 billion over 2017 and it's these tax breaks which are allowing ATT to deliver bonuses but we also just caught news this morning that after the bonuses go out they're gonna be looking to play off hundreds of people yeah so it did all of these stories sort of mash up in a really obnoxious way without me getting to soapbox II about politics like the real world it made a lot of will get yeah how do we get the holiday bonus anyways I'm not sure we were to be like a thousand bucks but anyways and this is not really a meaningful wage increase so there's that and a whole lot of metrics a lot of tap dancing and not enough you know substance yeah you know if we're talking about these companies getting these funds and improving and increasing their profits I think a lot of us would be hoping to see more investment in their networks and their infrastructures really building this out and keeping you know talented people employed as opposed to playing shenanigans with cash coming in but you know I I don't run a multi-billion dollar organization gotta get that file if you evolution network up and running is here for 20 G right there in your future now I definitely want to touch on this one because you know we loves our YouTube live streaming capabilities so if you don't see us coming on to Amazon to Amazon or whatever they're calling it oh been two-bit tubing on open tube I think this could be a smart play because we've already seen Amazon both Amazon bought out twitch so they already own one of the web's most popular streaming services if they could leverage their market stands in their affiliate program for advertising on user-generated content this could be the best case scenario for competition against YouTube but again it's still the ongoing ongoing battle of Amazon versus Google like the two biggest data user user information trafficking websites on the Internet going head-to-head and and that the third-place competition the outside competition to the service would be Facebook so again like consumers just being the ping-pong balls in a three-way battle of giant mega corporations there's a whole profit in our info it's petty stupid bull like you're really going to mount something that is all about oh hey we're gonna distribute Amazon Prime video in our original content not to Google and you know Google's like oh we're not gonna do YouTube then and we're doing our original content which you know isn't really the basis of what we were founded on but you know what whatever it's this is business and we like to pretend that this means something to consumers anything so yeah and yet I mean and it's the conflict of Awe so hoping like I would like to see some better competition for you to I am it makes me cranky and nervous when that competition is coming from Amazon and Facebook but until something arises where Google actually has to develop and support and better iterate for their content creators on YouTube then I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend I don't know it's not gonna come from an outlet like Vimeo we saw numerous other experiments shut down this year some that PocketNow was even trying to play along with in terms of monetizing user-generated video but it is it is an interesting place that we find ourselves in going into 2018 that we could be hoping for an Amazon competitor here solely because of the shenanigans that are being played at the top level with their subscriber bases well speaking of shenanigans you want to talk about Google playing around with its money-making big star freaking web browser and how they're just not there it's just a middle finger I know it it was unnecessary it was a waste of developer space you know there wasn't even like spoofing going on for Chrome on the Windows Store not not not cool Google I I actually stopped using Google Chrome as my primary browser I did a while back and I went back to Firefox and I've been fairly happy with Firefox the new quantum update was really clean and then they Firefox went and screwed it up by side loading some stupid add-on for mr. robot as part of like an AR game that no one asked for but um that way yeah I that kind of those kinds of moves really sour I think a lot of people on trying to shift ecosystems but but i I've still been rocking the Firefox and the most recent updates to Chrome if not instilled me with a lot of confidence so instead of wasting people's time by engaging in these kinds of shenanigans and putting up an app which is not an app on the Microsoft Store maybe Google could just make their browser better maybe put time and effort and energy towards that and really you know rolling out improvements to things like Android app support for Chrome OS and eventually into Chrome browsers and you could have like a really great Trojan horse for Microsoft products allowing people to run Android apps through their Chrome browsers but instead you know instead why not just throw up a giant middle finger to Microsoft because I know if Microsoft were to do the exact same thing everyone would would totally be fine with Microsoft that's against you AB strategy right now they have office and everything so that's going out there I mean there's also the potential for Google to compete back in the connected laptop space with the rumors of a snapdragon 845 being working to the repository for chromium right now so this is a I mean they they didn't have to rub this in I guess yeah um we have a couple tweets here's just circling back to a couple stories this is from Andrew Wallace at fat produce hashtag P and weekly with Apple admitting the slowing its phone how much do you want to bet that Android manufacturers are doing the same things and I don't know that I'd be terribly surprised if there weren't some investigation into how bogged down Android devices get I think one of the dangers is if it's true that's bad if it's not true then in progress because right now gonna I mean we're gonna crash over time you realize that yeah this is bound to happen when nothing gets done about it so I would already put a solid no to the whole throttling of performance that like when you have a ton of custom software running on top of Android which is the skin for the Linux kernel or a container for the Linux kernel I forget exactly what the word is that I'm trying to find there it's vacation brain uh it's bad either way because either your phone is slowing down by design or it's slowing down because it's poorly built and it's slowing down just this is a this is also from from Peter Hayden yes Amazon could create some competition here but given the natural low adoption rate it will likely have in the beginning I would ask how many will actually move I'm thinking of you at pocket now surely you could spread but only if it's worthwhile to try question mark hashtag P and weekly and I it I would actually be willing to take the jump especially knowing how well twitch works as a service for people who stringing games low adoption rate wouldn't necessarily bother me it would be about what platform offers us the best the best resources for producing the highest quality show that we can and we went through some real problems and we're still facing some little gremlins in how we broadcast on YouTube even if the adoption weren't the highest initially I'd still be willing to take the experiment if it meant that we could give you guys a higher quality show yeah yeah and I'm not sure if we're not mentoring them just because it's a under some non-disclosure or anything but I mean we we tried we have tried and I think we'll guarantee we're going to continue to try I mean most of our income does does work out of a Google in terms of the whole video sort of thing but it's just it's not to step on like you know whenever we've tried to we've posted videos directly to Twitter and directly to Facebook and the monetization just doesn't work for our main coverage but you know the this video feed has always existed as a way to interact in a real-time and then we produce a higher quality audio version of the broadcast for people to use to consume through their favorite podcast catchers I am les married to YouTube for this podcast if it can live somewhere else and it gives us better capabilities then I'd be fine making the jump obviously we wouldn't just jump ship from YouTube for our main device coverage that would require something meteor or also just you know we'd probably just double dip you know so videos will be uploaded to YouTube and to open tube that that I think would make sense in terms of future distribution but we'd have to take a look at the numbers on that so lots of plotting lots of planning there's always the hope that something better comes to long and that we take advantage of it in the meantime you can see full details on these stories and more hit pocketnow.com and look for the podcast section to get to this episode's rundown you can chat with us about what you have been reading up on with the hashtag P and weekly also be sure to catch in the pocket 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for full backups I'm a big fan of redundancy I think you should have some sort of local strategy some sort of off-site strategy and some kind of cloud strategy so Backblaze it might be the right fit for you make sure you visit Backblaze comm slash pocket now so they know you where you came from you can continue to support this show and receive a fully featured 15-day free trial at Backblaze comm slash pocket now you know dip your toe into the water see if you like the service if you like their setup and it's no cost to you to get started go there play with it start protecting yourself from potential bad times start today black blaze comm slash pocket now and we thank them for supporting the pocket now weekly yes indeed we do now let's get into our next segment here it's one that our former host and current friend of the show michael fisher wanted to put in for a long time since episode 100 well he never had the chance to do this two years after he stopped so let's give some background here so the story goes this week that Apple is now requiring game publishers for its App Store to disclose the odds of getting items within them that are loot boxes where users make an in-app purchase take the luck of the draw get one item out of a possible few that vary in rarity ability whatever the heck just helps the player so there's been fresh controversy on these leave boxes if you have not been aware II a withdrew its microtransaction economy for Star Wars where what loot boxes could have been and were used as a means to fast-forward through hours of potential grinding through the story it was just a bad look overall but where it gets relevant here is that our own Juan Carlos Pagnell has a very enthusiastic viewpoint on loot boxes as a means of gambling and whether it should be regulated as such now I don't have a particularly strong attachment to playing games I don't know how to hold a controller so yeah you've got like huge hands every time we've given you one it just sort of like snaps in half and then like you know no one else can play that's something that changes to admit I figured that if we're gonna be a segment I really think you should get it looked at I just ya know that's not where we're going with our fascitis we're going to do a segment on one of Kwan's passion points we might as well format it into something pretty and work are calling this segment defend yourself it's nothing fancy we have sixty seconds each for an opening statement up segments lasting 30 seconds each it'll be a rebuttal cross-examination and then closing remarks otherwise this segment would be 20 minutes and we'd be going over to the same hole well you don't want that you know what listen to that do you know any ones that know exactly so I'm going to let quad start off I got the timer here ready and I shall begin whenever you're ready so your time starts now so initial research into these types of mechanics does demonstrate that it really has little effect whether or not real-world money is being received but that the brain responds the same way to these slot machines style plays there's this huge dopamine release and it's a very aggressive way to restrict player involvement so my problem isn't necessarily with microtransactions I think this is the weaponization of taking micro transactions to the next level it's that real-world currency is not being applied to getting a thing it's a rolling slot machine mechanic that can be changed on the fly behind the scenes so it's not that this percentage stays the same if you're a while they can juice up your winnings or restrict your winnings to keep you playing more and so this type of disclosure is manda because what I ultimately do not want to have happen is law enforcement to get involved no entertainment industry wins when laws are written about this the industry needs so that's as opening statements that's and I guess I'll try and see if I can get mine up I just don't have fancy sound effects for you so well I can I can I can set at the same time so I'm going to pretend that this starts right now so in terms of just being able to talk about it's the whole microtransactions as a dopamine release I don't really see that because gambling it's just a set standard of terms if we were to regulate this as something more if I had mental health issue that would be something else and it would take a dramatic kind of all-around approach to dealing with it from healthcare necessities and all that in regards to the actual gambling itself where you're receiving either material goods or money as a result of putting in money for a game of chance I really don't see the point to it there is I mean you can do as well as putting in the odds and make sure that the process is as transparent as possible but in terms of that I mean unless you're I don't even think that a tournament would count because you're not there's no real entry fee and there'd be rules for that so there you go all right so those opening statements out of the way I'm gonna try and see if I can work a rebuttal into this working I think I think I already rebutted a little bit of your statement there that was that was sort of a response um so do we want to do another round on this is that is that how you want to structure this you know just another 30 seconds of well you know what we can just go into the cross-examination part okay go straight through I'll try they were just playing this by here so 30 seconds on the clock and it starts now so if we really want to dedicate a whole government you know a bill to this and make sure that how much money are we going to are we willing as public to spend on gamblers on so-called gamblers I'm gonna say I'm still gonna insist on well how I would oh sorry am i responding to that is that the question oh no I was just gonna ask that just a couple of questions and but yeah then go ahead okay my my major point is we shouldn't be I don't want to see unlicensed gambling in any video game no gamer really likes these mechanics we just deal with them because that's what's been built into these games and that we're starting to see them arrive in triple-a title so you're already spending $60 for the game then you're spending real-world money for in-game currency for a chance of unlocking a piece of a player mechanic which is going to improve your gameplay nobody wants that and especially from our conversation with dr. Timothy Fong at UCLA when we talked about smartphone addiction the outcome doesn't necessarily matter we're seeing the same patterns of behavior regardless of what you feed into and get out of the machine as if you were just playing the slots of Vegas so because of that because of the actual brain mechanics that I think we're focused on here and because of the fact that nobody wants this we might as well find other ways of monetizing additional monetizing games other micro transactions that these companies can continue to profit off of leave this one alone and especially keep it out of family friendly franchises I don't want my kids introduced to this style of gambling mechanic while playing a game focused on Disney characters Marvel characters Star Wars characters that's just particularly insidious to halt little kid player progress through these types of gotcha gotcha workings and I think we would all just be happier if they were excised because game developers cut them out is then we wouldn't have to get law enforcement involved we wouldn't have to get legislators involved we don't want that that's why we have movie ratings that's why we have game rating explicit lyrics warnings it's because the those industries police themselves so if those industries police themselves I'm wondering what's preventing the game industry from doing that to itself it's because it's to profits but it's also you know they also have something to lose they realize that's the EA realized that with this move but it's not preventing the rest of the industry you know they have different targets too from teenagers that you are kind of bordering on the independence level but still might tend to go for the parents credit card or something like that I'm wondering what's stopping the rest of the industry for more just mmm no I mean after a point what happens in a boardroom when you're getting an inside peek is to the companies that are actually producing and distributing these games is it doesn't matter if the games profitable it matters how profitable the game is so if you introduce a gambling mechanic in one game and you see the percentage by which the profits increase by that mechanic then technically you are losing money on future games if you don't also incorporate that that mechanic it starts to be discussed as if it's a loss for the company even if the game sales are still wildly profitable so it just becomes this lobster pot effects for the entire industry where more developers and more distributors are looking at how they can incorporate these because they don't want to be seen as losing money for their shareholders by not using them and that's what again this is why this has become so insidious as we've seen this this escalation of micro transaction policy and micro transaction adoption I'm actually not overly upset by micro transactions if you want to buy a bacon-wrapped gun with real money for a Call of Duty go and buy it um to a point I also don't I'm not particularly bothered by short cutting on grind what I'm mostly upset about is real world money being put towards a game of chance to potentially unlock game breaking or game improving mechanics for certain players cuz that right there that for me is a bridge too far for this type of incorporation I think it's predatory on the industry and we've already seen legislators start to get involved in the game industry it's I believe it's Chris Lee out of Hawaii is actually doing a really crazy cool YouTube series on what it takes to introduce a piece of legislation and he's focused on gambling in video games so we already see this is gonna start popping up at the state and the federal level it's only to game developers credit to get rid of this mechanic now and then play ball with companies like Apple so that you are disclosing whenever there is a chance element in one of your games that that's properly disclosed to consumers well that's interesting so what I perceived before this argument was that you were in favor of regulation whereas I was against it but it turns out that the different topic here the subset of the man kick and the mccarran's coming in here I find myself in favor of actually new legislation where you're hoping for inflation so I guess that's my name because that's my position this is the tricky this is so ask you a couple questions just actually I think we can probably cut to a conclusion here especially in the way that we've both sort of flipped on this issue is if the game industry can't police themselves then like your point now something needs to happen to prevent this type of mechanic from really growing roots in our video games it's already a major component of more Asian centric games that's we call them like gotcha gotcha mechanics yeah um we want to put a stop to this if the game developers won't do it themselves then I agree with you Jules I think someone else needs to step in now where I'm concerned and where I think a lot of our audience is gonna agree with this as a sentiment is right it's details well the government involvement in any piece or creation of media has never been to the benefit of medium we saw that with the film industry what you know where there was policing of morality in what could be filmed we saw that with the music industry especially during like the tipper gore era of the music debate before explicit warnings were put on on albums we saw that with the comic-book industry in the comic code as a response to government oversight and censorship of our media every single time we've seen this happen it's been bad for that industry but if the industry can't police itself then I think something else needs to step in I think another entity needs to step in well that you know depends on the government for example in UK there's a reason why they have them for trade and why they tend to you know it'd be a little bit more loose with their parity you're absolutely right it does depend on the government but we're talking about our government about why we have government in the RIAA and the entities that we do is because we haven't seen I'm not an anti-government guy I think people understand them I'm pretty left-leaning and I'm about a social democrat to be fair a lot of these assets that games come from are coming out of Hollywood and they have their own regulations for that but if people if you know these regulations started piling on the US and he find that you know game publishers find that to be too overbearing they might move over to well somewhere where it's less like London or maybe even like a tax Island shelter for for this kind of you know you can make a movie in the UK and not have it rated for the United States and then your movie will just never be shown in a movie theater in the United States you can release an album with explicit lyrics and not have it rated by the agencies and just not have it ever sold in the United States or listened to through any medium in the United States you're the only real thing that's game somewhere else it's the maps it's the most over sold or not repeated for and if they're not they're not passing along apps and they're going to have a you know ecosystem that's deprived of its to this speck into that speck so I mean it's really just about having the content there for these a big ecosystems rather than oh no ei doing something that pisses off the US government first well but it's more than just ei pissing off the US government EA has backed off of this loop box mechanic but they didn't actually fix the grind in the game significantly there's still a lot of player grind that has to happen in my own favourite mobile game what what I used to sort of benchmark graphics in all of our phone reviews is a marvel future fight which also introduced new characters that that relied on this sort of gambling mechanic and I sort of had to have a mini freakout about that too because I find again I say that's a bridge too far especially for franchise that I should be able to share with my kids and not have to worry about what's halting their player progress through real-world currency mechanics so well if we're talking about grind as part of the game I think that's a it's part of the same beast but it's a separate enough issue for our purposes here to you know I I agree if you ride should never be played especially when it's artificially applied to preventing player progress so you know the the EA thing was was so frustrating because it was I mean what was it to unlock everything in the game was gonna be something ridiculous like over 2000 hours of play there's not 2,000 hours of game content but you would have to play in a very repetitive content so let's see this dropped by EA for a Disney owned franchise we see this mechanic in several Disney properties like Disney emoji blitz has very random elements and how you can move forward in that game and we see this in a Disney franchise the mobile game in Marvel future fright so Disney is complicit and Disney is okay with gambling mechanics being utilized in their games they won't produce a raid at our film but they're fine with entry using your kids to GIMP so yeah this is all about the speedruns people and if you get the top speedrun you get $5,000 well good luck to y'all and we'll see you later let's move into our a segment here that you've been playing around with so it's been when it comes to these a collaborative pieces that we do here at pocket now we put it on the website pocketnow.com if you didn't know and it's it's kind of it's always fun trying to you know wrangle their responses together here but I feel like this one came up pretty good so if you're not familiar for the secret santa what what that is basically me oh we all get assigned a partner to give to we just figure out okay what what do we want to give in this case it has to be a smartphone so there's that and you know this is I friend this is a test of how well we pocket now really know each other as just people so um you want to start off with your kind of the deal here assigned Tony our editor-in-chief to give you something and he chose peer view what do you think well yeah so I this I I was actually really happy that you set this up because this was just sort of a fun little diversion to the end of the year videos and content that we've been producing and just the idea you know like if you could give another editor on the team any device what would it be and so Tony had me our editor-in-chief and he sent over a pure view 808 I mean not really but you know just that if we could you could have any phone and he nailed it I as someone who has spent a ton of time I actually am revisiting my lumia 1020 I'm gonna be doing just a some light shooting over the weekend after Christmas and and it was just it's it's such a an amazing phone to revisit but I never got to spend a lot of time with the Symbian the forerunner to this the PureView 808 so I mean it was totally the the right fit that was the the perfect response to where I've been for for phones and it was just kind of funny that you assigned Adam Lane to me he was like legit real professional photographer on our team and the first thing I thought of was like I would love to see what Adam could do with the Panasonic cm1 you know that unholy abomination of Panasonic cameras stapled to some cheap facsimile of an inch but I thought if anyone could get something cool out of this it would be it would be Adam Lane so I that's what I ultimately gifted him I mean that would be about like of all the bullet point of features they would date oh and it's a phone like you'd have to go all the way down for that but I mean he loves it he loves raw he loves the manual controls and the focus or after or whatever the heck that you know the wheel can do whoo you can set it to do whatever around the lens and then there's a full one-inch sensor which he's impressed with he notes that the the attend 20 has a 2/3 inch sensor so only sensor on an Android on any sort of mobile operating system device that was bigger than the 1020 yeah it's kind of crazy this is a this is getting into our Sony rx100 territory right yeah I mean you know we've seen seeing patents especially on a newer device that's potentially going back to smaller like 1/3 inch sensors like the luma the LGV 30 actually has a sensor shrink but they're making up for it with a better lens element but I still am I was i for that company that's gonna come with another giant sensor experiment like the 1020 I covered this last year and I did we're having an actual variable aperture where'd it go to for the CM one yeah from the CM one I don't know that it really had much of a release outside of Asian markets like if it no I mean the variable aperture because oh I don't know I mean I I haven't really spent any time with one eye I always wanted Panasonic never returned there my see yes bothered about their booth I might especially cuz you know I switched over to the micro four-thirds world for producing my coverage and I am actually shooting on a Panasonic now much to my chagrin over like well fine I don't want to talk about any of your phones you're dumb and then I ended up just go ahead and buying their cameras yeah and he and he tends to take a lot of model fashion photography so you know he would want a better flash in that he didn't get a xenon on the CM one so he's gonna get a standalone nitro torch for that so I mean you pretty much got him all the way almost all the way there uh as for me who did I give to I gave to my fellow news editor Adrian diakonos Q which he you know easily I never really get to talk to him I know I don't know what do you know what he's like in real life but no I just assume that he's pretty great for no nonsense got them dude and you know he always tends to have bias towards the the muscle cars and the muscle phones so I just gave him 1 + 5 t he seemed to be pretty happy with it he said that he is sister 5x he got on a discount and you know survived a couple of bootloop episodes so that so so snarky about Android I'd gotten through it Nexus 5x boot looping you know too bad the class action doesn't include Romania cuz you know well there's that so I got him pretty pretty close to the mark there by the way he was he decided to give time a a blackberry keep one and the reason why I wanna mention that is because let me try and see if I could find the passage because this is really gonna industrious as he is the BlackBerry key one it's also not extremely expensive so if we were to do this thing for real I'd have a chance to get a pricier better overall package from My Secret Santa gift giver and make a little profit after all it's the gesture that counts right so I sent him the the oneplus party after he sent out his gift so he didn't have the chance to realize that if he got a key one now which is like 450 right you know between the five tees you know lower and higher tiers he could be making 50 to 100 bucks if we sold it it just happens time exactly phone flippers but new on HGTV show really tens of people might watch oh 1.5 million people I would assume we got we got we could host it our pocket house channel that would be cool I'd say actually primary I assigned jaime to give me a little thing I own a cardigan sweater I know where that is that went because it's a long story I'd say Jules is the king of candid photography it leads me to believe that if there is anything he'd care about most is the camera on the phone candid photos require a product that can deliver with every shot involved much playing around with and he been kin and the Google who I'm running this show off of a pixel to Soho to pixel tails for me that would be great I'd appreciate that thank you but I think think about like what you could do candid shooting like with a phone in each hand two times the jewels we should 3d 3d photography candid photography and community should be bet that out definitely I mean just for contrarians steak maybe I would appreciate the iPhone 10 just a you know go around playfulness because I know we don't you know you you you typically don't get the same like you know wealth of phones that hi may gets but have you spent any appreciable time with a recent version of the iPhone oh no not really I mean I haven't even I've played around in the carer stores that I have not I've yet to touch an iPhone 10 so but recents a Twitter talk from you know I think was Dietrich knows Dan Seaford and he was just like trash and the cellular reception we're covering some of those stories about radio management and stuff I just mean like I think right now hi my hi may has the iPhone 8 the 8 plus and the 10 it would be worth maybe sending you the iPhone 8 for a week just to see how you feel about it what a modern iPhone feels like it was an interesting experience covering the 8 plus this year mm-hmm well I'd be I'd be done to go for it especially because of the other photos that I take let's see well what have I taken recently I lots of subway pictures well I've seen a few uh really sharp coming from the pixel I I've been very impressed few of them but I'm I'm kind of just more of a putting people carving up their knives in a ramen restaurant but sure I I don't know what to yes and a little bit I would definitely recommend people checking out the story just cuz like I said it's it's a we don't often get to give you guys the BTS or like talk about ourselves we're trying to staying we're trying to stay more focused on actual news and editorial and stuff so it was just sort of a nice way to round robin the editors and producers on the team - Chris yeah it's Christmas well and then also it's it's like in the dating game like how well do you know your compatriots and and what would you give them we do have a couple tweets here that I want to wrap up before we finish up the show - Peters first yeah well Peter has a couple but I would gonna mention his if this were down to me I would definitely give a v32 some catch acai no question but I would stick a mate 10 on the back four-point Jules I think I would get you a you 11 it just seems to suit you but I think you might like the design I mean no harm I have no objections to you 11 I personally want to carry a smaller phone these days but the you 11 very sleek I suppose you have a pretty good camera to do yeah I mean I mean I've seen Plus just to get that 2x1 screen but and you know like I also know you're not opposed to the dongle life so that wouldn't that wouldn't mess you up too much well Donnelly for the job relief little thing it's slow right yeah you've been rocking the neckband on that one too I still I still have my LG's so I'm still better the next you said Tech Beardsley why would you diss I don't doubt like oh you said neckbeard not tech beard okay I'll shut up now this one this one's a question I want to try there we don't have to spend a whole lot of time talking about this but sure I'm going to butcher this name sack is careth and Asus asked greetings from Greece hello to Greece your your comments on the i7 core pixel book price when while other companies stop mimicking apples insane pricing policy and I had to look it up because I remembered the launch of the pixel book I did like 37 the core i7 pixel book with 16 gig of ram and 512 gigabytes 1549 dollars that does not include the pixel book pen which is going to be another hundred dollars and then preferred care on that would be 249 so the grand total free fully outfitted pixel book core i7 would be one thousand eight hundred and ninety seven dollars if purchased today in the United States which means it's probably even more stinking expensive in countries around the EU $2,000 joules does a does Chrome OS fit a $2,000 mobile computing lifestyle strategy I would make it fit if it paid that much money I would make it fit Android apps sure I'll just I'll just load them all onto it and yeah I'll be I'll be hopefully not power washing them for like at least a couple years so I almost met dr. beer at my Panasonic camera which is running this podcast right now I have I'm really torn on this because I really want to respect a premium tier for any device manufacturer I was onboard the surface before people were like really getting onboard the surface train like the surface one I was in there saying like this is the right move from Microsoft I wanted to see a manufacturer offer a compelling product at a premium tier not just compete with Windows on price like you can buy a $2,000 MacBook or a $400 Dell like that's not the right way to always position your product so I really appreciated Microsoft taking the lead and it took until the surface pro 3 before I think that that idea took off with consumers I have a hard time with the bang for buck ratio on a Chrome OS device nearing in on that $2,000 price point because it's just nice it is really nice it's gorgeous hardware it's really well-constructed I don't know that that's enough to warrant what you can get out of the Chrome OS ecosystem right now and so that is a recommendation becomes more difficult I don't believe Chrome OS always needs to live on $200 plastic Chromebooks for kids like a grown-up option for Chrome OS totally makes sense III don't know that I could say by this though I would have a hard time saying this is the right fit for you I mean if it's easier just valve bring steam on to Android officially let's do that just yeah was it that's you know or steam OS or whatever it was just makin that can run on Chrome that's and you've got we bring all of your Android you know android apk is just make them specifically limited to Chrome OS or something I don't know maybe Google should do that oh I've been reading through a lot of the people that are that are like hash tagging mojo out their mobile journalism and that kind of on the ground on the on the run mobile production lifestyle idea and there's a lot of it that I find very compelling and I think apps are getting to that point where you can fulfill a lot of what you would need from more robust to x86 applications through a mobile interface I've produced videos on the road only on my phone you know shooting all the video recording the vo cutting up adding sound tracking and and layering compositing transitions and text all in 4k video and uploading it directly to YouTube from a smartphone it's not as fast as what I can do on a laptop but it's more than capable so that kind of stuff I'm not faulting Chrome OS here it's just this to me if my phrase for this podcast is a bridge too far $2000 for Chrome OS just feels like a bridge too far and I and I don't know this is just a feeling like it's my own personal bias as to what I think the value proposition is here and I don't know that Google has reached it just by delivering nice hardware you can get a lot of nice hardware for a more capable package get a fancy case for like 50 bucks and then just be happy with that laptop and you know what I get out of that is an investment near that two thousand dollar price point is phenomenally more robust and capable and I think it's just as nice and I think it's you know I'm not sacrificing anything in terms of screen resolution having a touchscreen and I can play with both windows appiy apps and full legacy x86 desktop grade workstation grade software I don't have to compromise and you know I'm saving a hundred dollars by buying a pixel book for significantly less capability and in a shell that's probably I in my opinion the aesthetic that I like for my lifestyle not as nice as what I can get from my gaming laptop yeah I mean you can play Angry Birds on both things just pretty or I just run an Android emulator and still enjoy android kitkat emulators because those things are so gross but I don't know that I've really answered your your your appeal to us discussing this Sakas but I appreciate you sending in the tweet with the question there I think I think it's about time we start wrapping the show up indeed so thank you everyone for making this show possible and if you want to attack this podcaster pocketnow.com you have that mega mailbag episode coming out for next week I'm sorry I thought you were gonna say just one other thing I was gonna take one more swag of diet root beer so I can burp on mic there you have it folks another episode of the pocket net weekly has come and gone this show is over but the conversation continues on Twitter where Jules is at point Jules and I'm humbly at some gadget guy pocket now is around the web various social media platforms and our home site pocketnow.com Spanish speakers definitely check out es pocketnow.com we're basically everywhere shows like this cannot exist without your support sharing the weekly with your friends who love mobile technology and dropping reviews on iTunes stitcher Google Play wherever you can review a podcast once again we want to thank 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