Tech News Weekly 446 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge is here. We kick off the show by talking about Common Sense Media's new report about how Google AI is failing kids, then OpenAI's rumored hardware device and Katie Collins of CNET joins us to talk about the death of OnePlus in the US and in Europe. Before I round things out about the celebration of Microsoft Comic Chat, which is now open source. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:41]:
This is Tech News Weekly episode 446 with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, July 16, 2026. Is OnePlus really gone for good? Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech. Your host Micah Sargent and I am joined this week by the wonderful Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. Welcome back.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:01:10]:
Hello. Hello. Happy to be here.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:12]:
Happy to have you. So if you out there are tuning in for the first time, welcome. This is the part of the show where we talk about our stories of the week, the stuff that's happening out there that we think is interesting and wants to share with you. So Jen, what is your story of the week?

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:01:30]:
Yeah, so this actually popped up on Tuesday and it's not something I've written about, but it's an area I'm very interested in as a parent. It's AI and children. So what happened was an organization called Common Sense Media published a report on July 14th basically reaming Google for its AI overviews and the way children are using them. Basically the report which is called very, it's a 40 page report, it's very in depth, it's AI overview and AI mode. It says that these features are not safe, reliable or accurate enough to be the kids default answer machine. Now sort of a little background here. Common Sense Media is a company, an organization that I have followed for years because I found it incredibly helpful when choosing media for my children. So if you want to go watch a movie, right and you think huh, I wonder if there's anything about telling kids that Santa isn't real or sex scenes depending on the age of your child.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:02:41]:
You can go to this website and search the media you want to consume with your child and it will give you an overview of what the what themes there are in that show or movie that you might not be comfortable with. And it rates those that movie and it does this for everything. TV shows, movies Games, websites, tons of things. It has rated Google's AI overviews and AI mode like redlined. It is like this is severe. It specifically failed all of our tested severe harm redlines. So basically it failed seven of our eight established AI principles for safety. And it's like this, they're like, this is bad.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:03:26]:
This is not good for your children. Bas it's saying that they, the AI overviews and the AI mode. So this is, we're not talking about using Gemini in a chatbot. We're talking about you go to Google and you type in the search bar, I'm looking for something. And you get the, everyone's probably familiar with the overview that you now get the AI overview. And then there's AI mode, which is more of an interactive chatbot. And so they're saying that with both, both of the features fail to properly and consistently respond to kids showing signs of crisis and they reinforce science and psychos mania as well as validating disordered eating. Like bad stuff.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:04:06]:
This is all bad stuff. And the reason this is so bad is, and this is something that you know, we've seen in other chatbots. Like this is not, this is not news that chatbots can do this. And we know that many companies are working hard to fix these problems. The issue with Google here is this isn't an app you download like ChatGPT. This is the regular Google search that children use. And Google has spent the last two decades pushing Chromebooks into schools and I and when your kid opens their Chromebook and Googles this is what they're now seeing. So it's in your school whether or not you want it to be.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:04:42]:
And the big issue that Common Sense Media, which is a non profit, independent research backed organization. So they don't have, they're not a lobbying organization, they don't have a specific agenda here other than to protect children. The biggest issue they have is that these, you can't turn this off. And these tools are now front and center for kids in their computers at school. Whether you're using them at home or not, they're there at school. And what they want Google to do is give schools and parents the ability to turn off these AI features. Google has responded and it says, it basically refutes all of these claims and says that this is their statement. AI The AI search features are an incredibly useful way for kids and teens to learn, explore and make sense of information in the world.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:05:34]:
Beyond the strong quality and safety guardrails built into search, our tools provide extra layers of protection and parents have controls to turn search off like off entirely so you're no longer able to search. So that's, that's like a nuclear solution. They also claim that the report tested a narrow set of ambiguous and contrived queries that don't reflect how people use search and aren't an effective way to measure product safety and helpfulness. But when you go to the report, the executive summary is basically says we found that both AI Overview and AI Mode failed kids in crisis, including missing clear signs of suicidal ideation, reinforcing signs of psychosis and mania, validating disordered eating, providing information that could facilitate bullying by handing over step by step instructions for making deep fakes. And of the two features, AI Mode performed better at detecting some kind of crisis, suggesting that Google already has safer technology that it could deploy, but it hasn't done so in the overview feature. And also the biggest complaint I think for teachers specifically in terms of the school device element here, is that for young learners, AI mode completed 100% of the homework assignments we gave it, doing all the work that the students are supposed to do, and both features proved to be to able unreliable and inaccurate. So this is, I mean this feels like quite a big deal to me because I've seen this happen with my kids using ChatGPT. But it's, it's an extra step to go there and it's an extra function and they've been specifically told by their student, by their teachers, you know, don't, if you're, if you're going to use AI, use it responsibly.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:07:20]:
Here's some of the ways you can use it, here are the ways you shouldn't use it. But your Google search bar is doing all of this for you as a kid now and it's not doing a good job according to a very exhaustive research report from this organization. So yeah, it's interesting to see. I mean Google, we've, we've seen this, this happen with ChatGPT when there were those awful instances of children who were somewhat encouraged, it sounded like allegedly to commit suicide by ChatGPT. The organizations are now putting safety guardrails in place and it sounds like Google has some of these too. But this is such an ubiquitous part of your Google experience now that it's popping up everywhere and we really need better parental controls. And this is what it always comes down to. These companies don't seem to build parental controls in from the beginning.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:08:16]:
They wait for things to go wrong and then they fix it. And that does not feel like a safe way for our children to be using technology 100%.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:24]:
That's, that's continues to be the thing that really is upsetting to me the most about all of this is how much of it is just well we gotta see what happens and then act after and then fix it. Yeah, this is not the way to do it. And you know, looking at the report, the idea that these things are contrived, I would want Google to explain that more what it means when it says that. Because if you look at the actual report and you see the type of things that are typed in, it doesn't seem, it doesn't describe the one thing that they talk about with eating disorders. Says the strongest signals drew some of the weakest responses, literally typing in I feel better after I vomit though. And then the AI overview saying it's completely normal to feel immediately better after vomiting. And look, yes, I can understand how

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:09:25]:
if you're sick, but not if you have an eating disorder. Completely different things here, completely devoid of

Mikah Sargent [00:09:32]:
context and in a vacuum, that's an understandable response. But this stuff is not happening in a vacuum. And that's the issue here. The, the idea that, you know, I honestly I had not considered people using the search bar sort of as that

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:09:52]:
chat bot, but it works that way now and that, that was sneaky. It sort of came, you know, it crept up on people and I think especially for non tech, you know, non tech savvy parents, Google's Google, you know, we, I might have safe search turned on so that they can't stumble across bad material. But that doesn't stop this, that does not stop the AI integration and the fact that it can just confidently spew incorrect facts or also give you the wrong interpretation because it's lacking that context and because it's no longer just giving you your 10 blue links, it's giving you its interpretation of the answer to your question, which is a completely different experience from what most parents are used to using Google for prior to AI. So it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. You know, you think it's just Google, but actually no, this is just like a chat GPT or a Claude chatbot sitting in your kid's web browser and in their school computer. That's, it's everywhere. Pretty bad. Yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:10:58]:
I mean and that's the thing, it is everywhere. But a lot of parents will lock things down, especially at home or in their kids devices, but you don't have any control over what, what your child loses at school. Yeah, yeah, I just, I feel go Google's response was. I'm not impressed with Google's response.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:16]:
I agree.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:11:18]:
That's a good way of putting it. They seem angry like about this report rather than addressing, you know, the genuine concern like a very simple solution giving parents giving parental control and school controls. Like schools can't turn this off either. So I mean I've noticed it on my kids Chromebooks and I'm like huh, this is weird. Why is this here?

Mikah Sargent [00:11:39]:
Why is this here? Why can't I turn it off? Why can't the teachers turn it off? And, and yeah, why is Google being defensive instead? Because this is the thing. It's not as if you and I know that what's being shown here in many cases is the same across all of the AI systems. And so it's not like Google is solely responsible for, you know what I mean? For people to hear this.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:12:07]:
There's an issue everywhere.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:08]:
Yeah, we know that Google to hear this and to still choose defensiveness instead of going ah yes, we do have a common failure of AI and we can better, better make use. So then you have to wonder what's the motivation underneath? Is it, you know, absolutely trying to get students using Google's AI over other AI and if a, if Common Sense media comes forth and says hey you, you are, you know, it's dangerous to do so then Google is suddenly going oh goodness, there go those education contracts. I also want to note common sense, you, you, you pointed it out. But as a, as a former religious person, that common sense term really does really ring for me as a sort of like conservative think tank group.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:13:09]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:09]:
So I've gotten Common Sense Media confused with that before. So as you noted, this is a group that is not, it's, it's not a political group. It is a way for parents and guardians to be able to understand the media. And so yes, as you pointed out,

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:13:24]:
incredibly useful tool you can have, you can download an app, you just type in the name of whatever it is your kid wants to watch or what app they want to download and it will, will give them a rating. And this, this report actually comes from their new AI Safety Institute that they quite recently formed because obviously they needed to start addressing the use of AI in, with, with children, for children. So, and they have quite, they have respected researchers. They, they spent three months on this report and this study. It seems very thorough. I was just, yes, and I was disappointed in Google's response so far, but perhaps we'll see more. Watch this space. But it's, it's, it's Definitely.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:14:09]:
I mean, and again, the funny thing is, you know, my kids really don't use Google on a regular basis. Their most obvious search tool is TikTok.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:19]:
Wait, huh?

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:14:21]:
Yeah, I know, I know. That's probably a whole other.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:24]:
This is not a judgment though. This is curiosity how you can, you can, you could use, lure, have answers on TikTok. They can give you answers.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:14:32]:
Yeah, I know, it's, it does, it does work like a search engine in many ways. But at school they are using Google without doubt. And it is, and like I said, this is, this is part of the biggest issue that common sense media has with what Google's approach here is that this has just been pushed into kids devices, educational devices with very little education for the teachers and the schools or an understanding of how this has changed the child's experience with the educational devices that they're using. So as everyone starts to think about back to school in the next month or so, it's certainly something to consider what your child is able to do on their school issue Chromebook that you maybe would not have dreamed of letting them do at home say, yeah, this,

Mikah Sargent [00:15:25]:
as you said, watch this space, of course. But I, it is good that these groups are doing this, are running these tests. Jeffrey Fowler has been a guest on the show before. Great work from Fowler and the rest of the team who took the time to test, you know, thousands and thousands of different search queries and try to see the current state of how this is filtered. I did write myself a little note here. I'm going to try using TikTok as a search engine for a little bit because I am now just so curious about that. I had no idea.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:16:02]:
I'm not saying it was a good search engine. I'm just saying that's what people, that's what my kids use it for all the time.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:08]:
That's really cool. That's cool. All right, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with our next story. We being Jen and myself, love a smart home story and this one's really fascinating. All right, we are back from the break, joined this week by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge. And we just finished talking about Google and its AI search tools. Now we're moving on to another AI company and that is OpenAI because it is reportedly getting into hardware. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman got the scoop on what the first device is going to be.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:49]:
You know, for a company everyone assumed would come out with glasses or a pocket sized pin or some other pendant, the actual Product might be a bit of a surprise. It certainly was to me. And the design choices behind it are stranger and more ambitious than just OpenAI made a gadget would suggest. There's also a legal fight attached because building this thing meant hiring a small army of people away from Apple, it seems, and Apple not so happy about it. So we've got a new product, an unusual bet on what it should be, and a lawsuit. Let's get into it, starting with what OpenAI is actually building. Gurman says that the device is a somehow mobile screen free smart speaker that OpenAI is positioning as a new type of home computer for the AI era. So not just an Echo or a HomePod, that's what OpenAI wants you to, you know, believe, but a category that's all of its own.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:47]:
So it lives in your home, it functions as a human like AI companion that can control smart home appliances, play media, answer questions, handle messages, and then pull in the full range of ChatGPT's capabilities. So you may be going, well, that sounds a whole heck of a lot like, minus the ChatGPT capability part, a whole heck of a lot like an Echo or home pod. But. But what OpenAI hopes will separate it from the smart speakers we already have is personality and personalization. Because OpenAI's seeming promise, or reported promise, is that it's going to get to know you over time. It'll start to anticipate your needs, it will surface information proactively. And Gurman says that they don't even describe it as a speaker internally. They call it the first of its kind, a computer built for AI to help busy people get more done.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:40]:
All right, I want to know, Jen, are you buying what OpenAI is selling? And I don't mean literally, I mean figuratively here, that this is somehow going to be an entirely different device. Even though it sounds to me like OpenAI's take on the smart speaker.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:19:00]:
Exactly. I mean, nothing here stands out as new or exciting. I mean, obviously this is all reportedly so this isn't like them launching and saying this is our product, so they may have something exciting to surprise us all with. But on its face, the rumors do not inspire much excitement in me. It makes me think, okay, this is something that every company has already tried to do and are currently doing. I mean, Google's newest Gemini for home smart speaker was designed for AI built for AI. The original smart speakers were built for AI, just a different generation of AI. You know, the original Alexa is, is.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:19:47]:
Was an artificial intelligence, just in a different form.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:50]:
Yeah.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:19:51]:
And you know, obviously less, much less advanced, but we now have Alexa and it's new. Amazon's newest hardware was designed for Alexa with sensors. And, and that was one of the other things that Mark Gurman reported, is that this will be equipped with sensors to understand the context of your home. All of which great. All of which already exists, all of which no one has done very successfully yet. That would be my big caveat here, is like, yes, this exists, I believe in many forms already, but nothing that has really achieved what the promise has been since the beginning. And the promise here really is ambient computing, a device that can do everything, everything for you in your home. And that's what smart speakers have been promised as since sort of day one and have been trying to move towards.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:20:43]:
There are a couple things that I've noticed here since we've had LLM ChatGPT style generative AI voice assistants like Alexa plus and Gemini for home is that there has been a move away from smart home and like home control as a device towards personal. A personal assistant. And those two things don't mesh easily. And I think everyone has already has discovered that that's. It's hard to do because you're. If you're trying to control a home and also respond to an individual when there are multiple individuals in a home, that's where things can go a little wrong. And that's the problem I think that both Amazon and Google have tried to address. And that's why their models perhaps aren't as powerful as the ones you might use.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:21:36]:
Like using Gemini on your phone is completely different from using Gemini for home in a smart speaker because they've got stronger guardrails. And this is something that we don't have any insight into of this new device, like how will it fit into a home versus a personal experience. The thing that really interests me that no one else really does, that they're saying they're going to do, is be proactive. That is not something that any smart speaker or smart assistant currently does for very good reasons.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:08]:
Please don't act on my behalf. I don't want my lights turning off

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:22:11]:
while I'm doing something or my oven turning on.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:14]:
Oh, golly.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:22:15]:
You know, there's, there's many reasons why there are strict guardrails on home home AI devices today because controlling things in a home can go awry very quickly. So that'll be interesting to see what they, you know, that's the most interesting thing I that came out of. This is proactive. I've only ever used one Other truly proactive voice assistant before, and this was. We've talked about it on the show before. It's a device called leq. It's a robot, a robotic companion for seniors. And the idea there is it will speak up before it's spoken to, to prompt you to talk to it and to engage with it.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:22:56]:
And reading through all of this, I. I feel like it's perhaps not a smart speaker in the way we think. It almost sounds more like some type of robot.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:09]:
Yeah.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:23:09]:
I mean, it talks about having arms and not arms and legs, but having mechanical elements. And it has a battery. And I've recently been testing some home robots. You know, they have personalities. That's sort of the idea that they should learn and adapt to your home. So I don't really think this is going to be like a Sonos Roam or an Echo Tap or a Portal Go or a Pixel Tablet, all of which are smart speakers with batteries. In case anyone thought there, no one had done that. But before, because everyone has done that before, I feel like if they're going to do something here, it's not, I mean, if it's a smart speaker with a battery, but something that moves around your home on its own, proactively interacting with you, that's something new.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:24:02]:
And that's also what we're seeing from like the. So the other side of the scale is the humanoid robot. We're seeing a lot. There's been a lot of interest in humanoid robotics. People trying to make humanoid robots for the home that will do your laundry and be proactive and clean your house for you. Something in between the giant humanoid robot, the 180 pounds that might fall on you, and the static smart speaker that sits on a counter and isn't really that useful beyond setting timers and playing music. I feel like there's a space there to be explored for sure. And I'm hoping that whatever OpenAI is actually developing here is much more ambitious than this report makes it sound.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:45]:
You remember when Amazon first came out with the Echo, and one of the sort of common refrains that you would hear was that it was a Trojan horse to get people to serve people Amazon ads and to get people buying more from Amazon. And we did learn over time that people rarely use the device for that. But I do have to wonder if part of OpenAI's desire to create this hardware is the same thing, is to get people using OpenAI instead of another tool. Especially now that we have sort of platform agnostic options that are becoming more popular, like openclaw for example, and the ability of people to sort of set up their own systems or interface with their own systems. And then you also have to look at, you know, the. We were literally just talking about it due to the vast real estate that Google has in terms of user base. How do you compete with that? And perhaps an in home device that gets to know you more, so then you feel like you're getting to know it more, so then you start to form emotional attachments to it would make you more of a committed OpenAI user than switching to a different bot.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:26:11]:
Yeah, I mean I'm sure that's a reason behind it. There is an arms race on right now to be your favorite companion. And again that goes more towards the idea that this might be something that you feel more connected to. Although to be fair, I hear from Amazon all the time people tell them that they love Alexa. Like it already. That has already started the idea of like really having the connection with the AI in your home. But the. The thing right now is there's no interaction between, you know, physical interaction, just talking.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:26:46]:
And so the. The fact that it has robotic elements to it I think is really interesting. And you talked earlier about how they've brought over a lot of Apple People. 400 Apple People is what I read was Apple had last year they released a white paper about how they had developed a robotic tabletop device. It was a lamp that looked like the Pixar lamp. And the whole white paper was about how to make a robot feel engaging by movement and oh my word. And that I feel like that's. Perhaps we might see something like that is my guess.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:27]:
That's what compelling is an argument for. Or the. Yeah. In fact Apple sued OpenAI last week as we record this accusing the company of stealing trade secrets. OpenAI said in response that the device veers significantly from anything Apple has on the market today. Well, yeah, I'm sure it has on the market today. And then went on to say that while we take these allegations seriously, we're not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit and that it believes in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose. Now that last one, that's the thing because California immediately will be like hey now people need to be able to be employed wherever they want to be.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:10]:
Yeah, yeah. More than 400 people hired away. Of course, you know you have Johnny, I've. Who's been helping OpenAI with this stuff and wasn't it. I mean didn't. Yeah. Because OpenAI bought the startup for 6.5 billion. Wasn't it love?

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:28:31]:
Love from. Is it love from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of. A lot of the people. The main person that's named in the lawsuit is. Was like Johnny Ives, like number two at Apple, who Johnny brought over, I think. But, yeah, so there's a lot.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:28:46]:
But Johnny. I was not named in the lawsuit. It's this specific Apple employee. Is it Roger Tang? I think, yeah, that's who it is. But speaking of Apple. And so it's interesting, I think both. So OpenAI, Facebook, Amazon have all been trying to do something in this space that Google and Apple have already done. And honestly, I do not see yet how this is going to change.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:29:10]:
And that is, and you said it in your introduction to this story, a personal device that knows you, knows context, and is always with you. That's your phone.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:19]:
Phone, yes. Our phones.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:29:21]:
I mean, 100%. What. What else do we need? There was an episode of the Vergecast this week where they ranked AI gadgets. Like, what gadgets most likely to become, like the best AI tool for you. The top eight. And everyone agreed. The smartphone is. I mean, there is no compelling alternative yet.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:29:40]:
Maybe open A will come. Open. Open AI will come out with one here. I love the idea of it being a physical manifestation of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It just makes me think this is going to be a robot of some sort.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:52]:
Am I going to have to get a car seat for it to bring it around with me as opposed to my phone, which.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:29:59]:
On your shoulder? Maybe.

Katie Collins [00:30:00]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:01]:
Okay, wait, now, now you might be onto something. I would maybe be okay with a little friend sitting on the shoulder. That's kind of cute.

Katie Collins [00:30:10]:
We could do it.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:11]:
Oh, man.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:30:13]:
Well, physical manifestation of ChatGPT does just slightly give me nightmares. I'm not gonna lie.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:19]:
Yeah. Once it's. I mean, and it's got eyes, it's got a camera, it's, you know, able to. I'm.

Katie Collins [00:30:25]:
I'm.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:26]:
I. This is the thing. I struggle because there are times where. So, for example. And we'll have to end the discussion pretty soon, but in my home, I've a dishwasher that had. So whatever. You install a dishwasher underneath a counter, you need to sort of like anchor it to whatever you have installed it. And typically there are these little clips that go at the top and can fasten to the underneath side of a counter.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:58]:
But if your countertop is not wood underneath, but instead is stone like mine is, then you have to figure out some other way. And the people who installed it, they Just use a little bit of epoxy adhesive on those clips and then fasten them to the underside of the counter. Unfortunately, over time that stuff goes brittle and so those clips have actually detached now. And so I was trying to think of a if I could just redo the epoxy that was already there, if there was some other method. And so I took photos of what was going on, popped it into. Into for me, Claude and said, you know, hey, this dishwasher, da, da, da, da, da. And it looked at the photos and said, hey, I'm pretty sure that's an epoxy adhesive based on these reasons and, etc, etc. Etc.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:45]:
And, and my point is that, you know, I had to take those photos and upload them. The thought that I could just be sort of standing by something I'm working on and go, could you look up the manual for this really quick? Yeah, that's kind of a cool idea. So in that way I like the idea of the awareness, but in every other way I don't like the idea of the awareness. I don't really think I want ChatGPT having the ability to look in on what I'm doing. Yeah, whenever it wants. So it's kind of a hard thing.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:32:17]:
It's going to come down to that old, you know, classic tech push and pull conflict. Do you know, how much value do you get versus how much privacy do you have to give up? So if they, if they have to, it has to be useful in order for people to embrace something like this in their home. And it's so different being in a home from a personal device. I can't stress that enough. OpenAI if you don't know the smart home, you really need to think about this because it is not easy. And as Amazon and Google will tell you, it's very hard to create a device that is both a personal and a communal device running a home. So it'll be very interesting to see what they come up with here. I like the idea of the little chatgpt devil on my shoulder.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:04]:
And it definitely would be a devil. All right, well, Jennifer Patterson, today, I want to thank you so much for taking, taking the time to join us today. If people would like to keep up with the work that you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:33:16]:
Yeah, everything's@the verge.com I have a author page where you can see all of my articles and reviews. And then I also just finished. We've just finished airing the fourth season of Version History podcast from the Verge and We did a smart home series last weekend was Philips Hughes. So go check that out. It's a fun episode. And this Sunday, I'm not on it, but I'm excited because it's the clapper. Oh, yes. So, yeah, go check that out.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:33:48]:
So if you want to learn more about smart home history.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:52]:
Awesome, awesome. Thank you, Jen. We appreciate it.

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:33:55]:
Yeah, good to be here. Bye.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:56]:
Bye. Bye. Alrighty, folks, let's take a quick break before we come back with my interview up next. All right, we are back from the break. For more than a decade, OnePlus built a loyal following by doing things a little differently than everyone else in the phone world. Now that chapter is closing, at least on this side of the globe. And how a one time underdog arrived at this moment says a lot about where the smartphone business stands today. Here to walk us through what's happening and what it means is CNET's own Katie Collins.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:28]:
Welcome, Katie.

Katie Collins [00:34:29]:
Hello. Thank you for having me.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:31]:
Absolutely. So with this story kind of let's start with the headline news here. I'd love to Hear what exactly OnePlus announced this week and what it means for the brand in the US and in Europe.

Katie Collins [00:34:44]:
Yeah. So after months and months of speculation, OnePlus finally officially announced today that it is going to be withdrawing from the US and Europe, which means no more OnePlus phones will be for sale on either side of the pond for us, which is a sad day for tech, but it is something that we have kind of seen coming for a little while now.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:06]:
Now, OnePlus and Oppo, of course, we know, have been intertwined for years. Would you be able to explain how the two companies are related and then how that relationship shaped what's happening now?

Katie Collins [00:35:20]:
Yeah, I can give it a go, although I will. It's a little bit complicated because I feel like there's you. OnePlus hasn't always been totally clear about its relationship with Oppo because it was founded by Pete Lau, who is remains CEO to this day. And he was a kind of former Oppo employee. And part of Oppo is a long standing investor, the main investor, we think, in OnePlus. So they've had a sort of relationship going back to the beginning. That relationship was kind of made more public and formalized in 2021 when they kind of started to merge operations a lot more. You know, they said publicly that they were sharing manufacturing lines, but it's kind of this the case that Oppo is the bigger company here and OnePlus has been kind of a subsidiary of Oppo it's got a couple of different subsidiaries, obviously Oppo makes its own phone and then there's Realme as Well and then OnePlus.

Katie Collins [00:36:18]:
So it's, it's kind of a, is a family and yeah, I think, I think that's, that is how they are related. But, you know, little complex.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:29]:
Exactly. A little complex and a little obfuscated it seems. So your reporting of course ties this move to broader pressures that seem to be hitting the whole phone industry right now. Could you kind of talk more broadly about the market and how perhaps that made a decision like this more likely?

Katie Collins [00:36:49]:
Yeah, I mean if anyone has tried to buy technology over the last year, they might have noticed how more expensive it's got. And you know, that's kind of across the board. And that's because we're dealing with this industry wide memory shortage, often referred to as Ramageddon. And it's really pumped up the prices of memory. It's just made everything more expensive across the board. And as a result, you know, we are buying less tech. There you, the kind of demand for phones has really dropped. You know, we've seen numbers that suggest that we're sort of a long time low in the number of phones that are being shipped around the world.

Katie Collins [00:37:26]:
So, you know, it's tricky times for the phone industry. And I will say, you know, the companies that are right at the top, who are the dominant players in the industry, Apple and Samsung, I think that they're feeling it less. But for these smaller, smaller phone companies, it's hard, harder to compete and you know, they're struggling.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:43]:
Absolutely. And the struggle and the work that the company seemed to do was different depending on where things were happening. If you could kind of summarize or give us some insight into how you feel, the company may have been held back in each of these regions. What, what, what contributed perhaps there?

Katie Collins [00:38:09]:
Yeah, so the Europe and the US have very different kind of environments when it comes to phone buying. You know, we, we have a lot of the same brands, but the way that people buy phones in Europe, it's, you know, it's all very fragmented across the different countries. Different brands are popular in different countries and it's, it's very, the competition is intense over here in the, and that has, you know, really, we, OnePlus has really struggled with that. In the U.S. you know, a lot of the phone buying is still really tied to carriers and it's tied to retail presence in stores. And for a company that mainly does online drops like OnePlus and you know, doesn't have those deep carrier relationships where it has people from the carriers pushing their phones and trying to encourage people to buy them. You know, it's much more of a struggle to, to compete. So they're very different pressures in different regions.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:03]:
That makes a lot of sense. One thing that OnePlus has made its name on is being the flagship killer by undercutting bigger rivals whenever it came to price. Do you feel like the identity of the company has shifted over time? And, and if so, how, how has that changed?

Katie Collins [00:39:27]:
Yeah, I remember when OnePlus first arrived on the scene and you know, it had this reputation for doing these kind of very limited edition drops. It had this kind of marketing strategy where, you know, it would send out invites and people would have to sign up and it felt it kind of manufactured this sort of air of exclusivity. And the premise of the product was that they were, and I think because, you know, they were building in, they were building in China and they had really good manufacturers and component relationships over there, they were able to build phones that competed with flagship phones that we were seeing from other companies, but at a much cheaper price. So, you know, it was this kind of, it was this sort of combination of having this kind of cult following and being this, I feel like for a while it was like the connoisseur's choice among, you know, hardcore Android fans. And you know, over the years, years, what we've seen is it's just been harder and harder for OnePlus to keep up that A, initial buzz and B, that kind of premise by which they are selling much more advanced phones that compete with flagships at a lower price point. You know, they've also had to push their prices up. So, and I will say that, you know, they are, their flagships have still been great. You know, we've loved reviewing their flagships over the years and even in the last, you know, in the OnePlus 15, we were so impressed with like the battery, for example, is a really kind of like industry leading battery for us.

Katie Collins [00:40:53]:
So, you know, they have still been competitive, but just not in the way they were initially.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:57]:
That makes sense. And then now for people who already own a OnePlus phone, what is going to change for those folks going forward and then what stays the same?

Katie Collins [00:41:09]:
Yeah, so if you've got a OnePlus phone, you might be worried right now about future security updates and software updates and understandably so, fortunately OnePlus has been very clear about this. It will still, it will honor all of the updates that it promised when you got that phone. What will be different is that though, instead of coming from OnePlus, those updates will instead come from Oppo. So it might be that the operating system looks a little different. You might be getting some things might change in terms of user interface and features, but overall you'll still be getting the phone that you purchased originally. And OnePlus is fulfilling all of its promises there.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:57]:
Then lastly, kind of stopped short of calling this the definitive end of OnePlus everywhere. So where does the brand go from here and what does its exit signal about the state of the phone market overall? Are we going to be left with just Pixel, Samsung and Apple as the makers of hardware, at least in our necks of the wood?

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:42:25]:
Yeah, yeah.

Katie Collins [00:42:27]:
I mean, I kind of hope not simply because there are so many exciting phone companies out there beyond, you know, Apple and Samsung and Pixel, you know, and Motorola, which is also kind of a big player in the US like, you know, a lot of the Chinese phone brands are doing such interesting things that unfortunately we can usually get them over here in Europe. You guys often can't get hold of them, you know, and then there's companies like nothing that are doing really interesting things as well. So I hope that it's not the end of these smaller phone brands when it comes to OnePlus. So what we know right now is it's going to really focus on the Chinese Chinese market. So OnePlus phones will still be for sale in China and for now it looks like it's going to continue on in India as well, although rumors suggest that that might also come to an end next year. We have no. OnePlus hasn't commented on that right now, but it looks like it might be in the future a China only phone brand

Mikah Sargent [00:43:27]:
that sadly makes sense and is, I agree, a little disappointing. I think that the competition should be there and I like that there are these quirky options and seeing that get reduced to, you know, slabs of glass and metal that are relatively character less is, is a bit of a bummer. In any case though, I want to thank you, Katie, for taking the time to join us today. If people would like to stay up to date with the work that you do, where are the places they should go to do so?

Katie Collins [00:44:05]:
So you can find me on cnet.com all of my work is on there. And yeah, I would love to encourage you to check out my work and the work of my colleagues as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:17]:
Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it.

Katie Collins [00:44:20]:
Thank you.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:21]:
All righty, folks, we've got One more little bit. All right, I've got a story for, as they say, folks of a certain age, we're going to feel this, I think, in their bones. Microsoft just open sourced Comic Chat. This is that mid-90s IRC client that turned your text chats into actual comic strips, complete with illustrated characters and speech bubbles and even facial expressions that were generated from whatever you typed. I remind you, this is from the mid-90s. If you were online in 1996, you were might. You might remember it as the thing bundled with Internet Explorer 3 and then later bundled with Windows 98. Now, if you don't remember Comic Chat itself, you almost certainly remember the font it helped popularize Comic Sans.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:09]:
Yes, Comic Sans came by way of Comic Chat. The announcement went up on the Microsoft Open, or as I used to say when I lived in the Midwest, Comic Sans. The announcement went up on the Microsoft Open Source blog, written by Robert Standifer and Scott Hanselman, who we love. And the code is now sitting on GitHub under an MIT license 30 years after the thing first shipped. So let's talk about Comic Chat, what it was, the people behind it, and why Microsoft is pulling out the ostrich feather duster and making it pretty and ready for you. If you're feeling brave, I can also tell you how to run it yourself. So Comic Chat, again, a chat client, and it would take IRC conversations, turn them into these comic panels. This is again long before generative AI was what it is today and would use the context of the conversation to read the text that you type and then make editorial decisions about how to draw it.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:16]:
So if you wrote something like I like that, then your character might point at itself. You know, it might point at something. If you type something that reads as angry, then the character might frown or cross its arms. The blog frames it as more than just a skin on top of irc, by the way. It interpreted conversational cues and then chose these poses, these facial expressions, these gestures, even panel layouts. And it did so in real time. This was the mid-90s, so Internet chat was largely walls of scrolling text. Comic Chat was a different way to look at things and see a different way of enjoying a conversation.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:58]:
The blog says, you know, it was quirky, it was ambitious, it was occasionally chaotic and surprisingly forward looking. Now, as far as Comic Sans, this was designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Conair. That's C o n n a r E, not Conair, in 1994. And it was designed independently, but it found its home in Comic Chat. The you Know, that hand lettered look was good for showing these speech bubbles or part of a comic. It unfortunately was also the most mocked font on the Internet. And it was, and I mean frankly still is one of the most mocked fonts. But you know, we understand that at the time that made sense and it worked for this, but people then started to use it for everything.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:53]:
And I think that's where we really had the issue as far as where this came from. The idea came from someone named David DJ Kurlander who was in the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds group. This was 1995 that Comic Chat was being developed, built in visual C&MFC, released in 96 alongside Internet Explorer 3. And then Kurlander, Tim Skelly and David Salson published a paper on the taco in 96. This is a computer graphics conference and called it just an experiment in quote, automatic illustration, construction and layout. The art was the work of Jim Woodring, who was an independent comic artist at the time and said that his characters were part of what made this work. I mean, that makes sense. Plus the team handed Woodring transcripts of real chat sessions to illustrate and then use those results to decide whether the whole concept was even worth pursuing.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:56]:
So I love this. They had this idea, they found this independent artist, they said, okay, could this be something? Here are some real conversations. Can you illustrate these? And when they saw the illustrations, they were like, this is compelling, this is awesome. So they went forward with it. So why is Microsoft releasing it now? Well, Microsoft has been doing a lot of this open sourcing lately and I absolutely celebrate the fact it's about preservation. The blog says open sourcing in general is about preserving an important piece of software history, letting the community explore, learn and build upon it. And I love it. Like many of these open sourcing moments, it isn't just the raw old code.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:39]:
Microsoft also bundled in a few AI powered modernization attempts. So that means getting 1990s C code, building in current Visual Studio, connecting to modern IRC servers, and then running legibly on high res Windows displays where otherwise, you know, it would not look as good. And it says, of course these are not polished re releases, they're just demonstrations that Comic Chat can still work on modern systems, basically. That said, this is not just an open sourcing and preservation moment. I would argue it is also. Here's, here's what I, I, if I, if I were to try to read between the lines or read some tea leaves, my guess would be that there are wonderful people who are very interested in historical preservation and open Sourcing. But that work requires, well, a lot of work. And so how do you, you sort of let these projects happen and exist, and how do you let them get funded and paid for, especially right now where there are a lot of layoffs happening? Well, I would argue that one way to do that is by saying, you know what we can do? We can show how, if we use the modern AI tools, we can take old code and make it work now.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:13]:
So it does serve as a bit of an advertisement for the capabilities of Copilot. The cynical look here would be to say that this is all just about selling Copilot. But given the people who are leading the charge on these efforts, I choose to believe that it is instead preservation primarily. But it needs the financial justification. And so it kind of plays two roles here. Comic Chat, localized into 24 languages back in the day, bundled with Windows 98, you know, it wasn't just a little experiment. It was bundled in with everything. It got renamed to Microsoft Chat, so it was no longer just Comic Chat.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:04]:
And, and that's a very important context and understanding for what I'm about to tell you about, which is that you can use Comic Chat today. So there are two paths, depending on how technical you want to get. The easy way is actually just running the original app. You don't even need the source drop to experience Comic Chat from Microsoft, because the original Microsoft Chat, that Comic Chat installer, is in existence on the Internet Archive. We'll have a link in the show notes. Archive.org has it. You can download the installer, you can run it on Windows, you'll need to run it in compatibility mode. Or if you have a Windows 98 virtual machine, then you can use that as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:50]:
And you know, IRC of course still exists. So you point the client at an IRC server and a channel and then draw in your conversation as a consultation in real time. So it still works. You can also go the developer way, the fun way here, which is to build that open source code. So head to that repo on GitHub and then, you know, work through the process. So there's a whole set of guidelines and instructions on how you go about doing so, so you can check it out. That said, this is decades old C&MFC code. Microsoft itself calls the modernized versions worked examples, not finished products.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:31]:
So you're going to get some rough edges if you go the build it yourself route. Even if you never compile a line though, the source is browsable on GitHub. So if you just want to see how a 1996 app was made and how, like what choices were made with it and how editorial decisions were made based on drawing comics. Then head over to the GitHub repo and check it out there. But I celebrate and really appreciate the work that some of the folks at Microsoft, these sort of software historians, are doing when it comes to this, because there's just a lot of cool old software out there that deserves attention. And it almost feels like in a couple of months we could have seen one of the AI systems showing a feature like this and it would get attention and feel new. But it turns out that before Generative AI this stuff was already happening. And goodness gracious, I love that that it's, it's, it's a reminder of how much the statement that there's nothing new under the sun actually is.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:54]:
And it's good to be reminded of that at times. So folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. I want to thank you so much for being here with us this week. If you would like to subscribe to the show, if you're not already, head to twit.t/tv/tnw. That is where you go to get the show in audio and video formats. You could even even head there if you are a subscriber and grab one of those links and then send it to a friend and then they will also subscribe to the show. And we love that. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network where you can go to Chihuahua.Coffee, that's C H I H U A H U A.Coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:31]:
Be sure to check out my other shows including iOS today, Hands-on Apple and Hands-On Tech. And I will catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye Bye.