Transcripts
Tech News Weekly Episode 232 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Jason Howell (00:00:00):
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. It's me, Jason Howell. My co-host Mikah Sargent, and a whole lot of news to talk about. We start things off. Yes, I'm sorry. We do start off with Elon Musk and his acquisition of Twitter, but we've got Faiz Siddiqui from Washington post to talk all about that really interesting stuff. All Apple's self service repair kit is out Anne Warren from six colors, joins us to talk all about that. To show off a little bit of what's inside the kit, that sort of stuff. Snap has released another piece of hardware. It's called the pixie and it's a flying camera drone. So we talk about that and even compare it to other products that we've seen from snap in the past. And finally, we dive into how autocorrect works behind the scenes. Really fascinating stuff, all that more coming up next on tech news, weekly
... (00:00:49):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Jason Howell (00:01:08):
This is Tech News Weekly episode 232 recorded Thursday, April 28th, 2022.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:14):
This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by New Relic. That next 9:00 PM call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does, and you can get access to the whole new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free per month forever. No credit card required. Sign up at new relic.com/tnw.
Jason Howell (00:01:35):
And by Melissa, the us postal service process is more than 98,000 address changes daily. Make sure your customer costs. Tech data is up to date. Try Melissa's APIs and the developer portal. It's easy to log on, sign up and start playing in the API sandbox. 24 7 get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twi.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:57):
Hello, and welcome to Tech News Weekly. The show where every week we talk to and about the people making a and breaking the tech news. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent,
Jason Howell (00:02:07):
And I'm the other one, Jason Howellll. And I know last week we joked, we had a funny mm-hmm <affirmative> around the fact that we weren't gonna talk at all about Elon Musk. Okay. And then this week, I wish I could say the same, but you can't, but I can't. Okay. Because he went and bought Twitter apparently, or he is in the process of it. So we're gonna talk a little bit more about Elon Musk today. Apologies if he loves
Mikah Sargent (00:02:28):
It.
Jason Howell (00:02:28):
So he loves it.
Mikah Sargent (00:02:29):
We're not apologizing.
Jason Howell (00:02:30):
It's part of the reason why he does these things. I'm, I'm pretty convinced of that. Joining us to talk about all of the action that's happening with Elon Musk, with Twitter, even Tesla, all that stuff is Faiz Siddiqui from the Washington post who actually reports on all things. Elon Musk, welcome to the Chavez.
Faiz Siddiqui (00:02:48):
Hey, thank you for having
Jason Howell (00:02:49):
Me. Absolutely. It's great to get you on today. So we've got, I mean, this, obviously this interview could go in a million different directions because I feel like just this week alone, there are like 20 different kind of tangential kind of stories related to Elon Musk, Tesla, Twitter, and everything. Let's start with the deal though, just to kind of set the stage here. What are some of the, what are the important details around this deal that was announced earlier this week? What's expected to happen when this is all buttoned up.
Faiz Siddiqui (00:03:19):
So Ian Musk is buying Twitter for 44 billion. He disclosed last week that he had lined up the funding about 25 billion was financing from banks, including Morgan Stanley around 21 billion was equity financing, meaning he was gonna put his own Tesla stock on the line. Of course the deal comes in just under that total at 44 billion. It's expected to close later this year and it sort of remains to be seen what might happen as far as seeing his agenda through he's laid out a pretty extensive agenda and whether that might mean executive shakeups or, you know, any, any sorts of, of immediate changes remains to be seen.
Jason Howell (00:04:02):
Yeah, I think that's one of the questions that I have is, you know, if it's by the end of the year or later this year, whenever that is not immediate, does he still have, though in the interim, some sort of influence over the mechanations happening behind the scenes at Twitter? What, what, what is your take on, on that? Or is he pretty much on the sidelines just tweeting his thoughts as he goes along and hoping that they they, they take up his recommendations, whatever they may be?
Faiz Siddiqui (00:04:30):
Well, he is certainly not relegated himself to a sideline role and it seems like Twitter as, as a workplace right now, seems to be a bit at his mercy. I mean, he as directed criticisms at some top Twitter executives that obviously led to some concerns about, you know, how he would wield his influence because obviously Musks criticisms though they are criticisms rooted in the work of the exact it unleashes this barrage of other scrutiny, but often harassment too. So I mean he does wield a tremendous amount of power even from the outside. One other thing I'll point out on the deal is that there's a $1 billion breakup fee. So if one of the parties decides to walk away such as Musk that's the cost
Jason Howell (00:05:27):
Interesting touching on, on that real quick here prior, you know, what you just said, as far as him tweeting out kind of calling out the Twitter executives on the platform, has he made any sort of follow up reaction to, to what been this like pile on effect? I mean, he has to, he has to understand and recognize that when he says things like that, it's going to result in any number of people targeting and harassing and going down that road. And he's not, he's not making any comment about the reaction to it at this point. Right.
Faiz Siddiqui (00:06:02):
Musk did reply to a former Twitter CEO. Basically, I, I believe his point was something along the lines of like he is trying to better the platform. I mean, he hasn't addressed the criticisms or the impacts of the criticisms directly and harassment. He hasn't yeah, I mean, when this kind of thing happens you know, I've been covering Musk for a little while and it's kind of rare to see him walk anything back <laugh> yeah.
Jason Howell (00:06:35):
That's part of what makes him so, you know, an interesting figure to follow along, you know, for better or for worse, right. There's always a, it's almost like he's always teetering on the edge of controversy if not diving full board into that pool. So that's, so you certainly have your hands full covering Musk all the time throughout all of that. Now you quoted Ross Gerber in your initial piece, announcing the deal or, or reporting on the deal who essentially said that this deal makes Musk more more powerful than some countries now, how, like, what exactly is he talking about there is that, is that just the power that, that comes with controlling Twitter as a platform that we've seen previous years and recent years to be a, a very heavily used tool in political, you know, communication and negotiation, that sort of stuff, or does that involve like, you know, his combo effect of, you know, he's got Twitter or eventually he will have Twitter Tesla and the automotive space, SpaceX, you know, everything combined, what is your take there <affirmative>
Faiz Siddiqui (00:07:40):
I think it's much more the latter. I mean, Tesla's the most valuable automaker in the world right now. Yeah. SpaceX as Gerber pointed out is a not only trying to put, put people on Mars, it's also a strategic asset for the United States. I mean, it rejuvenated this space program and now Twitter, which must see as the defacto town square. I mean, for all of its faults, it is where a lot of the world's most powerful go to disseminate information or even engage in debates or troll each other.
Jason Howell (00:08:17):
Yeah. Yeah. It's become a big time platform for, or for reaching the press, like almost going directly to the press or going around the press in order to communicate your agenda or your opinion or whatever. So very powerful there. How, how is all of this news throughout the course of this week impacting Twitter shareholders? Like what, what out the Twitter stock? I mean, obviously ultimately this means that Twitter goes private, but what about in the meantime, how are they responding to this?
Faiz Siddiqui (00:08:48):
So there's been a bit of hedging seems against the possibility that, you know, look at it this way. Shareholders have a standing offer of $54 and 20 cents for, you know, the outstanding shares in Twitter. And so any trading below that price is a bet that, you know, it's better to have that money right now, hedging against the possibility that it doesn't go through or, or just generally, you know, saying like, I need to get outta my position. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so, you know, the stock has reacted maybe as one might expect with a deal involving Musk, it's also reacted somewhat inversely to Tesla. So, you know, Tesla, a San by a hundred billion and you know, the follow and Twitter, Twitter seemed to do fine that day, the following day, Twitter sank and Tesla was relatively stable.
Jason Howell (00:09:50):
Yeah. Like when I, when I think about those, those fluctuations I'm reminded of Dorsey and the criticism of, well, well, Dorsey's got his hands in too many different, you know, different major projects, right. We need him to peel back and, and, and focus things. Meanwhile, here, you've got Elon Musk and I mean, he's got his hands in some of the most major things and multiples, and now he's just adding more onto that. Maybe, you know, maybe that's, that's part of that. Now, Elon has mentioned many times and continues to that. This has to do, you know, largely with free speech you know, giving making sure that everybody has access to to get on and communicate and, and all that. I'm sure he's, you know, he's, he's made comments about Twitter's recent years of, of clamping down, you know, the booting of, of Donald Trump, all that kind of stuff.
Jason Howell (00:10:40):
And along with that, we're also hearing a, about this kind of swing that's happening in Twitter follower account liberal accounts are losing subscribe or losing followers conservative accounts, gaining followers. Do you like, what, what is the impact here ultimately like, like if you had to look in your crystal ball, I mean, you could take Donald Trump as, as the obvious example here, based on your understanding of Musk as a person, will his words kind of line up with his actions when it comes to someone like a Donald Trump and bringing him potential back to the platform, what do you see for Twitter in the next year or two based on what you know about Musk?
Faiz Siddiqui (00:11:24):
Well, I can tell you what Musk has said about permanent bands in general. I mean, he spoke to a Ted conference this month and he said he would be very careful about instituting permanent bands and much more a fan of timeouts. And you know, when the subject of permanent bands comes up, I mean, I'm sure people can only name that one off the top of their head, if right. If any. And so the question is obviously alluding to the former president, but Musk hasn't actually said anything specific. Yeah. I don't know, as far as whether he can, can he hold that over someone <laugh> like the idea that he Musk is a kid maker and can just like, you know, restore someone's profile. Hmm. I don't know about that, but like we do know what he thinks in the abstract about permanent bands, like the one the former president received.
Jason Howell (00:12:22):
Sure, sure. Now finally there was chatter yesterday that kind of alluded to, I can't remember the, the reporting where exactly this came him from. I, I, I didn't put that in my notes, but that it was likely that Elon would ultimately back out of this deal, which struck me as kind of strange, but I don't know, Elon Musk nearly as well as you probably do after following him for so long. Is that characteristic, would that be characteristic of Elon at this point through all of this kind of build up to eventually say, actually, you know what, I've changed my mind, or to kind of hit that roadblock where he is like, this doesn't make sense to me anymore. I'm I'm jumping out or is he kind of too committed at this point to do that? What do you think?
Faiz Siddiqui (00:13:07):
What I, what I will tell you is that I think everyone sort of needs to take a step back and sort of think about where we were at the beginning of April and think about how many people said, oh, this is a troll, this is some, one of his many stunts. And where are we now? We are now in a position where Musk Musk has gone from being revealed to be a, what, 9% stakeholder shareholder in Twitter to getting this board seat, but not getting this board seat to lining up some financing, even though people were like, I don't know if he can really afford it to now, he's the perspective owner of Twitter. I don't know. I, I would say in general, <laugh> we all need to be a little bit more careful of about predicting what comes next.
Jason Howell (00:13:57):
Yeah, yeah. That, that is a really good reminder, right? Every step of the way people have been going, oh, he's not gonna do that. Oh, wait. He just did that. Oh, he is not gonna do the next thing. Oh, he just did the next thing. So
Faiz Siddiqui (00:14:09):
I totally sympathize with you guys when you were just like, wow, we're not gonna talk about Elon Musk. <Laugh>.
Jason Howell (00:14:16):
I mean, it's just, it's just this information train keeps on rolling. But but it is fascinating, nonetheless, regardless of anything, he knows how to stay connected to the line of communication that people are, you know, are really care about. And right now, obviously he's capturing a lot of a of attention for good reasons. So usually certainly have your hands full following you on Musk. Really appreciate you taking time, carving out some time today to talk to us about it. Faiz Siddiqui of course writes for the Washington post Washington post.com. If people wanna follow you online work and they find you
Faiz Siddiqui (00:14:48):
At Faizsays
Jason Howell (00:14:52):
Right on, thank you so much, Faiz we
Faiz Siddiqui (00:14:54):
Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
New Speaker (00:14:56):
Take care. We'll talk to you soon.
Mikah Sargent (00:14:57):
Indeed. Thank you for your time. All right. Up next. Apple has finally launched its self-service repair program. I think it had been promising for a while. So what does it entail? Well, we'll find out after this break, because this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by new Relic. If you're a software engineer you've been there, it's 9:00 PM. You're finally unwinding from work. Ah, lying back, getting your bubble pipe out, a nice Camile T wow.
Jason Howell (00:15:26):
It's like, you know, me,
Mikah Sargent (00:15:28):
Your fuzzy bunny slippers on yes. And then sudden your phone buzzes with an alert and something is broken. No. And your mind's already racing at what could be wrong. That is where new Relic comes in. As you're wondering, is it the back end or the front end? Is it global? Is it the server? Is it the network? Is it the cloud provider? Do we have slow running queries? Did I end produce a bug in my last deploy? Now the whole team's scrambling from tool to tool and messaging person after person to find and fix the issue. In fact, according to a new Relic report, only half of all organizations are implementing observability for their networks and systems. That's what new Relic does. Observing ability. The report showed how maintaining network observability continues to be an issue for companies around the world. That's not gonna happen.
Mikah Sargent (00:16:19):
If you get new Relic, new Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you'd normally buy separately. So engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place, you're going to get application monitoring. AP am that's unified monitoring for your apps and microservices. You'll get Kubernetes and pixie instant Kubernetes observability with pixie distributed tracing. So you can see all your traces without management headaches. So you can find and fix issues, fast network performance monitoring. So you can stop guessing where performance issues start and ditch data silos for assist some wide correlated view, plus so much more, more importantly, though, you can pinpoint issues down to the line of code. So you know exactly why the problem happened and can resolve it quickly. That's why the dev and ops team at DoorDash at GitHub at epic games and folks, more than 14,000 other companies use new Relic to debug and improve their software.
Mikah Sargent (00:17:16):
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Mikah Sargent (00:18:07):
If you forgot it, it's new relic.com/tnw. Go there, check it out. And of course, our thanks to new Relic for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right. We're back from the break. Now that means it's time to talk about something that apple announced. I believe it, the end of last year, we'll get to that in a second. Perhaps our guest knows, but not too long ago announced the self-service repair program. And they said soon, we're going to have some different products available to you so that if your device breaks, you can, if you would like take care of it yourself, but then we didn't hear about it for a while. And then a few articles started coming out saying is apple ever going to announce this thing? Is it gonna release this thing? And it continued to not happen until now. And so joining us today to talk about it from six colors, it's Dan Moren.
Dan Moren (00:19:13):
Hey, Mikah, how's it going?
Mikah Sargent (00:19:15):
It's going well. And we've prepared something special for you.
Dan Moren (00:19:18):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>
Mikah Sargent (00:19:22):
That sound means you're the birthday boy.
Dan Moren (00:19:25):
Happy
Jason Howell (00:19:26):
Birthday birthday. If I had a noise maker ride blow.
Dan Moren (00:19:29):
Thank you. You very exciting. The trumpets. Nice. Assume you got those special.
Jason Howell (00:19:34):
Yeah, we have a few people. All right. You guys are good. There
Mikah Sargent (00:19:36):
You go. Oh,
Jason Howell (00:19:37):
Help yourself. Some food in the kitchen.
Mikah Sargent (00:19:39):
Get some coffee, whatever you need. Cool. Thank you for being here today on your birthday. We appreciate you joining us. So let's start by, maybe you can answer the question of when apple first said that it was planning on doing the self-service repair program.
Dan Moren (00:19:56):
Yeah, that was last November. So you're right around the end of last year, they announced that this was something they would start doing in 2022, but it wasn't until just this week that they actually started rolling out the processes, allowing people to get the parts and tools they, in order to start repairing their iPhones.
Mikah Sargent (00:20:14):
Now at the time the conversation definitely surrounded a lot of not necessarily court cases in, in every instance, but some regulatory attention being paid to apple in different ways. And one of those ways was the repairability of its devices. And I know that a lot of folks kind of said, oh, apple is, you know, doing this so that they can have an answer for when the repairability thing happened. And so we got that super early announcement, but we only just now got the actual roll out of it. And it was interesting how it came a few days after people started to say Hey, I thought apple was supposed to be announcing a repairability program. What's what's going on there. So in any case, it is here and I was hope thing that you could start by kind of talking about what this has ended up looking like. If, if someone say I am talking on my phone and I accidentally drop it to the ground and crack the screen, and I'm like, you know what, I think I'm gonna try to do this myself. What does the process look like? For me going in and getting a fix for my iPhone 13.
Dan Moren (00:21:28):
Sure. Yeah. So basically what Apple's done is set up a site it's at self-service repair.com. I believe it's managed by a third party, but essentially it is a way that you can get apple genuine parts. You can get apple genuine tools. You can get access to service manuals, the same ones that basically apple technicians use. When you take your phone into an apple store, an authorized reseller retailer repair place, et cetera and you can get access to those, those pieces and those tools and do the repair yourself. Now in order to do it make a couple caveats here, one, there are only a small number of devices currently supported. They're all I phones. They are basically the iPhone 12 line, the iPhone 13 line and the most recent iPhone se. And then in each case, there are only certain repairs that are available. I think there's maybe half a dozen or so for each of them among which include the display the speaker, the battery, et cetera, things that are very sort of simple to do. And apple has said that this will expand over time, not only in terms of what products are actually available, but where this service is available. It's currently, I believe us only though they said they plan to start expanding it into Europe. And then in theory, potentially more complex repairs might be available at some point, that little unclear at this point.
Mikah Sargent (00:22:51):
Yeah. So that, that was kind of one of my curiosities it, while I will say that, you know, looking through these manuals and looking at the site that's been set up of course I already created an account on the site cuz I, I thought that it was just going to require my apple ID, but it was actually whole separate account, which was kind of odd. But anyway, I signed up there in the event that this is something that I do. I was hoping that you could talk about because, okay, so if I were to go to, I fix it I could look up my iPhone and I could order a screen to replace my iPhone screen if it were broken. And with that they offer usually either just the, the repair part itself or the repair part in a couple of tools. But one of the things that apple has that you can't just get by going to, I fix it is some tools, as you said, that they use kind of behind the scenes, if you were to take your phone in I, how are those tools available? And I'm gonna have to spend $2,000 for a thing that heats up my, my phone display. How does that work?
Dan Moren (00:24:01):
Yeah. So there's a couple options. Actually you can buy the tool outright. And the apple, I believe has said that these parts and tools are available to consumers at the same prices that they're available to basically technicians third party technicians who want to buy them from apple and as such, I was actually kind of surprised in some of these cases that they're as cheap as they are. I mean, like, as you're saying, there's a heated display removal fixture, which you're showing there is $250, which is expensive. I mean, if you're just replacing one screen, you probably don't wanna spend 250 bucks. That's more probably than taking it into the apple store in the first place. But I guess if you break screens a lot, you could decide to buy one and just have it on hand in case or I'll fix all your friends.
Dan Moren (00:24:42):
Yeah. Your, have you, yeah, exactly. There you go. Set up a little lucrative side in there. But apple is also a offering the ability to rent the tools you need. And they're providing them as like a big package. Like, and when I say big package, I mean very large, like this is two like big, you know, wheeled plastic cases, full of tools. And they think, they say they, they weigh something like 30 or 40 pounds of. So, you know, this is a serious business here, but they will rent it to you for $49, including shipping. They'll send it out to you, you get it for seven days and then you drop it back at the ups store when you're done. And you don't need to worry about keeping those things around the house, which frankly seems, I would say pretty reasonable. I mean, again, most of these cases, people probably aren't buying these tools outright because the number of times you actually want to use them is probably pretty low. So making it affordable and easy to rent these things does seem like a, a good solution sort of in the mid ground there.
Mikah Sargent (00:25:39):
Yeah. The I've gone through and configured with an iPhone 12 mini. I can get the I, the heated display removals fixture, which is this big honk and gray box that has you plug it in and it's got heat and all that kind of stuff for $256, I can get the display press, which is this huge metal contraption with a handle that you pull to press some display for $216. And then the actual heated display pocket, which is this special contraption that fits the phone in perfectly for $116. None of that really calls to me, but I have to tell you, the torque drivers <laugh> are actually kind of interesting because with these, you are essentially for folks who don't know it is making it so that when you tighten it, it only lets you tighten it to a certain extent. That's the kind of the torque, the pressure at which you're tightening something.
Mikah Sargent (00:26:32):
So that's one of the things that I've always kind of been concerned about, cuz I wanna make sure things are very tight, but I don't wanna over tighten. And so when I use my I Fixit tools to do this kind of stuff, I maybe side on, on the side of, of not tightening too much mm-hmm <affirmative>, but with these torque drivers, you essentially, you know, push it and it will start clicking and not let you press any harder or tighten any harder than apple recommends for the different pieces. So that's kind of cool. But the, I I've seen online that the rental, if you do the whole rental that comes with the display press that comes with the, the heater, it's a seven day rental. Yeah. Have you done any repairs in the past and when you have, was it one of those things that you had to yourself up to, or did you kind of quickly get on it? Cuz I'm thinking and I'll, I'll kind of talk for myself in a moment. Whenever I've done this in the past, but seven days kind of made me a little worried. What about you?
Dan Moren (00:27:34):
<Laugh> well, I'm not somebody who has done a lot of repairs to my iPhone that said I've for a long time, spent a lot of time taking apart computers, including several max used to work in it and spend a lot of time sort of with my hands in computers, getting them all scraped up from all the sharp metal pieces and delighted things like that. In terms of the stuff, if you're looking at something that's really like a one time task, I think a seven day time period seems pretty reasonable to me. I feel like once I get that toolkit, I can be sort of like rare in to go. I find that a lot of times when I've done repairs, they take me, you know, the better part of an afternoon or something like that, depending on how complex it is generally, if it takes longer, it's because I did something wrong, have to take it apart and put it back together again. But on the iPhone side, I think I've always been a little, a little more wary about dealing with such these tiny C it's in there and accidentally breaking something. So maybe this increases the pressure a little bit to know that you have to return it. It's like getting the the, the best new releases at the library where they only give it to you a certain amount of time. And you gotta finish reading that book in amount of time. Cause never get it again.
Mikah Sargent (00:28:38):
Yeah. I was going through the manual and one thing I didn't know apple actually recommends that you, when you undo this, all of those screws should be replaced. You should put new screws in because those screws have a little blue wax on them. That's I thought it was just sort of a material to help grab, but it is, it's more of an adhesive. And so by reusing the screws, you're not getting the best sort of fascinating that you possibly can. So I've, it's a good tip. Yeah, exactly. Pro tip straight from the source. So do you foresee, I mean sort of looking into your crystal ball and also listening to what other folks have said about the, the self-service repair program. Do you think this increases decreases or doesn't change the number of people who will take on self-repair versus taking this in to, to be serviced?
Dan Moren (00:29:35):
I think perhaps I don't see it decreasing it necessarily, but I think it's probably flat to a small increase. And the reason for that is I think the kind of people who are likely to do their own repairs are the kind of people who've always been likely to do their own repairs. I don't think necessarily that new people are gonna be like, oh, well I broke my iPhone. I'll give, I mean, I give a shot at facing the screen. I know a lot of people who have broken their iPhone screens, there are very few of them that I think would be willing to do this. Especially given that like, depending on the relative costs, right? Like you gotta rent the tools, you gotta buy the parts, you gotta invest the time. All of that added up. You might have a lot of people saying it's just as easy for me to go to the apple store and pay the fee and have somebody else worry about it.
Dan Moren (00:30:19):
Most people don't change their oil, right? Like you could, I know people who do, but the people who do change their oil are, are doing it because they've invested the time and energy and learning how to do that. But a lot of people are happy to just drive down the street and pay the 30 bucks or whatever to have somebody replace their oil. So for me, I feel like it's great that this option is there. I do think that one caveat and brought up is there are a lot of people, especially those pushing the sort of right to repair agenda that they don't think this goes far enough. For example, you have to provide a serial number for the device before you order any parts. Which, you know, I think people are sometimes concerned like again, the whole movement promulgated on the idea that this is my device I can do with it, what I want and I should be able to repair it. You know, they don't like the idea of not being able to buy parts without it being tied to a specific device. I don't know, apple already has programs for dealing with independent repair shops and stuff. So it's not as though there are businesses necessarily. I wanna buy, you know, 20 batteries to have on hand so I can replace batteries for people. There are other venues for them to do that. So I don't know how much of an actual problem that is, but I can understand people being concerned about it.
Mikah Sargent (00:31:25):
Absolutely. folks in the chat were asking, are you able to replace the charging port on your iPhone using this? I'm looking through and the options are battery bottom, speaker, camera display, SIM tray, and tactic engine the seven tray, by the way, $7 and 20 cents to get,
Dan Moren (00:31:47):
Just send you a new one. You can swap that out. That's easy. One. That's easy. That's an easy one. Yeah. I always gonna say, yeah, anyone can do. Yeah, they they have said in their initial or actually in the initial announcement back in November, they said that it would roll out most common, only service modules at the beginning. And the ability ability for additional repairs would be available later next year. So the potential to do that is possibly coming later in the year, just depending on parts and stuff like that. So you may be able to replace it, but don't think you can go in and replace it with like a USBC port that's, that's not how that works.
Mikah Sargent (00:32:23):
I'm
Dan Moren (00:32:23):
Gonna upgrade my port <laugh> that's right. Modular phone. I take out the stuff I don't want throw in new stuff. <Laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:32:30):
Do you think that what if you had to guess, what would we see next hitting this? Is it just gonna be more iPhones? Do you think that you know, max will make their way into this or will that always kind of be a, a, a thing that you gotta send in your, your computer for?
Dan Moren (00:32:47):
I feel pretty good about the possibility of max getting there, because again, that is a place where user servicing is a long tradition and it's something that I think is very feasible. Likewise, the iPad seems likely that if the iPhone's there as an option, the iPad would be there as an option. I'm a little curious about some of the other stuff. Like, I don't think Apple's gonna give you the chance to replace anything in your AirPods or say your apple watch. I think those would be a lot dicier for people to take apart, not impossible, but you know I don't think it's at the top of the list, but max yeah, I think the max will probably show up at some point, Hey, maybe even in your apple TV take it, take it apart and fix that wonky port in the back or something. <Laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:33:28):
Well, I, I think that that pretty much covers it. We, we went through some of the, the different devices that you're able to repair and talked a little bit about the repair man. I guess my last question is, should I, or should I not throw my iPhone to the ground right now? Just so I can get some of these fun tools that apples offering,
Dan Moren (00:33:52):
Well, nothing stopping you from getting those fun tools without throwing your iPhone off. True,
Jason Howell (00:33:56):
True.
Dan Moren (00:33:57):
Just
Mikah Sargent (00:33:58):
Own
Dan Moren (00:33:58):
Personal decision. Not to do that. So I, I don't know. That's a decision we've all gotta make for ourselves when it comes to our iPhones and gravity. <Laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:34:07):
Thank you so much for joining us today on your birthday of all days, of course, folks can head to six colors.com to check out your great work, but if they wanna follow you online, where else can they go?
Dan Moren (00:34:18):
You can find me at D Mor on Twitter and Instagram and my website's at de moren.com.
Mikah Sargent (00:34:24):
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Dan Moren (00:34:26):
Thanks guys. Take it easy.
Jason Howell (00:34:27):
Thanks, Stan. All right. Up next selfie sticks. But in the air like you throw 'em in the air. That's what we're gonna talk about. I know it's caught your attention cause you don't wanna carry around a selfie stick, but you wanna throw one in the air. We'll see what, sorry, we're gonna talk about that up next. But first this episode of technique weekly is brought to you by Melissa to ensure your business is successful. You already know your customer information, it needs to be accurate. And Melissa's gonna help you with that. Melissa's the leading provider of global data quality and address management solutions. Melissa's actually, and independent has 37 years of data quality expertise. That explains why more than 10,000 businesses know them as the address experts. Melissa has a renewal rate of over 92% because 25% is the typical ROI for Melissa customers.
Jason Howell (00:35:19):
There you go. Melissa also capped off 2020 a one by reaching a milestone 30 billion north American address lookups throughout the year, the most in its history. So things are going great for Melissa right now and great for you. If you're using Melissa, you can verify addresses, emails, phone numbers, and names all in real time when using Melissa their global address verification service verifies addresses for more than 240 countries and territories at the point of entry. So right when you're entering into the field, you get that kind of like auto updated visual feedback of what you're typing. You can select it. I'm sure you've seen that on forms before. If you're tired of duplicate customer information in your database, while Melissa's data matching will actually help eliminate clutter and duplicates that increases the accuracy of the database. It also reduces postage and mailing costs.
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Jason Howell (00:37:10):
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Jason Howell (00:38:09):
Try Melissa's APIs in the developer portal. It's easy to log on, sign up and start playing in the API sandbox 24 7, and you can get started today and you will get 1000 records cleaned for free by going to melissa.com/twi that's melissa.com/twi. And we thank Melissa for their continued support of Tech News Weekly. All right, so this kind of broke shortly before Showtime mm-hmm <affirmative> and at first it was a, it was an FCC filing, which those are always fun. They come through, they're like, okay, we now know there's something happening. And then immediately after the company, snap seemed to announce the product. So I don't know if this was like a reaction to the FCC story they're oh, well, you know why let that steal all the energy let's let's be on it. Or if it was just the timing worked out, but snap has a new gadget that it's announcing officially.
Jason Howell (00:39:05):
It's not a, another pair of spectacles for your face, which we can talk about. Not for my face. I don't have 'em, but it's a camera in the sky and this is actually a really interesting idea here. So these are some of the photos that were initially shown off with the FCC filing. And so this was kind of the first clue, you know, it's, it's like a yellow, it's a big clue. Yeah, it's a, I mean, yeah, it's, it's pretty much everything <laugh> right. Except for all the marketing speak around it. So what is it called? It's called the pick PI X, Y, and it's a mini drone. It's a little drone that's they say pocket size, although looking at it, I'm kinda like, all right, well, you gotta have like large or extra large size pockets for that to fit in.
Jason Howell (00:39:49):
But I guess technically I could imagine, you know, being able to carry this drone around in your pocket, it's bright, yellow, not to hardly, I guess that's the snap color, right? Snaps. Snap's all about you. There you go. Looks, I mean, looks pretty sturdy. Like I've seen a, a good amount of, of different drones and everything. And sometimes drones for as active as they are flying around, crash into the ground and everything. They still look like they can be kind of fragile. Like, you know what I mean? Like the, the different pieces of them look very exposed and everything, this thing seems like a very kind of like tight tight box that the, the quads fit into. So I don't know if that means that it's, you know, really resistant to breaking easily or whatever, but it looks, it looks that way.
Jason Howell (00:40:36):
Nonetheless. it's meant to be portal it's meant to travel with you. It's available today in us and France for $229 99 cents. So $230 for a mini drone. It has a camera on board. And so those, the, it can record videos up to 2.7 K resolution. It also can shoot 12 megapixel photos. It has a replaceable battery. So essentially the battery can power this thing for five to eight flights, which doesn't sound like a lot of flights. I don't know how long those flights are, but nonetheless, I guess that's neat to have that option and it's lightweight. It's 101 grams. So there you go. And actually you're seeing right now kind of the, the a snap released video, which shows a lot of different footage from the camera. It's like half a second of footage though, you know? Yeah, yeah. Little clips here and there.
Jason Howell (00:41:27):
I don't, I don't know the length of the clips that are recorded, like how long it records for. I didn't see any, any sort of information about that, but it doesn't have a controller, so this is not a drone that you pick up a control and you fly around, you know, in whatever way you choose. It has a single button and then kind of a little dial to, to select the mode. Okay. And that, that cycles through a four different preconfigured flight paths. Mm. So you can say, I want this to float in front of us and just take a selfie. And so, you know, you, you, it, it takes off, it just floats out there. That's, that's where it's like the replacement of the selfie stick. It goes out and you can get your selfie. It can also orbit around you.
Jason Howell (00:42:10):
So that's kind of a cool effect, which we've seen, you know, a lot of drones actually with cameras on board, our program to do that. This has obviously made a lot more consumer like everyday consumer friendly. And then there's a follow as you walk and a follow as you run mode. I think those are the four primary modes that it has on board. And so you basically just select the mode, hit the button, it takes off from your Palm. And does the thing, I, I guess it starts recording. I don't know if it's it's recording immediately or if it gets in place and starts recording or whatever, and then all of that footage is then channeled back to the phone. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> of course, to the snap app, if you're using snap, it's all ends up inside of Snapchat memories and you can do whatever you want from there. If you wanna spruce it up with effects or just share it out that way or whatever. That's basically what it does. Hmm. So yeah, it, it flies it photos or videos and then it lands and you've got the footage to show for it.
Mikah Sargent (00:43:10):
I think, I think I would end up being disappointed by the what is the word? The very staunch guideline not guidelines. It, it, it, doesn't the limitations, the limitations limit. I think I would be yeah. Kind of bothered by the limitations of it, because the idea sounds cool, but it there's so little that you are able to do. And I want it, I'm, I'm looking at this and I'm like, I've got a little drone here. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and it's got a camera built into it. Yeah. I wanna do so much more with it than what it,
Jason Howell (00:43:42):
Things
Mikah Sargent (00:43:42):
Giving me the ability to do. Yeah. And according to the verge, cuz it seems like after the FCC document leaked and then after, or not leaked, it was not, but was noticed. And after that then all of the different tech sites were able to put out their embargoed reviews of it. The verge did a review of it and oh, okay. One of the things that they say is that a full charge will get you five to eight flights and each flight ranges from roughly 10 to 20 seconds. So you get very much footage on each of the five to eight flights and each five to eight flights is only 10 to 20 seconds. Yeah. You know, I would want to like capture, I, I want one flight that has, you know, 20 times eight as opposed to just that, that short period of time or what have
Jason Howell (00:44:33):
You. Yeah. Or have the option. Yeah.
Mikah Sargent (00:44:35):
Have the option to keep it in, in flight for a little bit longer. So then I'm going, oh, I should just get a more expensive drone that can do that where I can shoot cool footage of like running through the forest or what have you. Yeah. And I think that that's kind of been the limitation of everyth that snap has made. It's always, they, they always have such a, a specific idea,
Jason Howell (00:44:57):
Very specific. Yes.
Mikah Sargent (00:44:58):
And they don't want you to do anything outside of that. And through that comes the limitation of giving people a tool and seeing what it is that they do with that mm-hmm <affirmative> when the apple watch first came out, it was supposed us to be this sort of communication device and the apple originally called it the most personal device we've ever made. And it was all about how you could share your heartbeat with someone
Jason Howell (00:45:21):
Else. Right?
Mikah Sargent (00:45:22):
Yeah. I remember that. And how there were all these like tapping things where you could send messages to people, but as the apple watch got to more people and apple saw how they were using it, it was more of a health product. It was more of a, a fitness and health wearable mm-hmm <affirmative> and apple pivoted based on that. But from spectacles, number one, all the way up to whatever spectacles number we're on now and now with this drone and whatever else snap makes, they just, they come up with an idea and they limit things so much that you don't even get chance to experiment with the other things that it can do. And I think that that is what keeps these things as weird boutique products that not everybody ends up using.
Jason Howell (00:46:01):
They really continue to be that any, any of the technology that's coming out of, of snap. It's interesting that a social media company, cuz I, I guess I would consider snap primarily a social media, even though they consider themselves more than that. Right. They consider themselves a hardware company and everything. But I think at the foundation of all of this is the we're making products that make sharing on snap more interesting. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, you know, it's all based around their, their social media platform whatever you want to call it. And so the devices that you're talking about strike me as devices that maybe have the benefit of being more, more, all purpose, right?
Mikah Sargent (00:46:42):
Yeah,
Jason Howell (00:46:42):
Exactly. A, a device that's created like a drone with a camera that is created to do many cool things that isn't tied to snap mm-hmm <affirmative> and snap seems to say, it seems to be wanting to be to,
Mikah Sargent (00:46:53):
You can only use this for snap. Yeah.
Jason Howell (00:46:56):
Value
Mikah Sargent (00:46:56):
A lot of money on it and you can only use it. And it's like basically the people who get this are the influencers who they send it to for free because they want the influencers to use
Jason Howell (00:47:06):
This. Right. And then other people see
Mikah Sargent (00:47:08):
That and then other people see that that's interesting. That's cool. But then most of those people don't get it because then they see the of it. And so I just, I don't know, who's because I remember I, I had the, the, the second version of snap spectacles and I had, I think I had the first and the second version, but the second version obviously was a little bit better. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and what I liked about it and what I still kind of wish that I had today is that it's a camera that is at your eyeline. And there are often times when I am doing something in real life. Yeah. And I'm going, man, I wish that I had a camera that could see everything my eyes could see and was at that height. So that it's very easy for me to like do a tutorial, for example.
Mikah Sargent (00:47:50):
Yeah. If I'm, you know, my brother sends me a message asking for help with something and then I could actually physically do that thing and talk about it as I was doing it. And so I remember I wanted to do a review of a product and it was an unboxing actually. So something even simpler. And I, I was like, I'm gonna use these spectacles to do that because it will be at eye line, da, da. So I put them on and you have to keep hitting the button to get them to record. So I would be trying to do the unboxing, but at the same time, I'm thinking in my head, part of my attention is focused on the yeah, exactly. But there's a little L E D light that lets, you know, when it's over. So boo over boo boo and sporting, the video was then this whole thing. Oh boy. Because it connects over Bluetooth. And so transferring video files over Bluetooth takes forever. Yeah. And you know, it was all of this work and I got the footage exported and of course the thing with Snapchat spectacles is that it shoots this circular video. Right. So that in Snapchat's app, you can like move your phone and you see more footage with it. So then I had to edit it in a certain way to get it to actually look right. And it was just so much more such
Jason Howell (00:49:00):
Pain in the butt. Yeah. Totally.
Mikah Sargent (00:49:01):
To do more with it than what it was designed for,
Jason Howell (00:49:04):
You know, what you needed, actually
Mikah Sargent (00:49:06):
You needed anything else. You need
Jason Howell (00:49:07):
Google glass
Mikah Sargent (00:49:08):
That would've
Jason Howell (00:49:09):
Been, and I'm not even joking. Like that was the, that was the thing that I loved about Google glass mm-hmm <affirmative> and one of the only, the first person view I really, really engaged with. Yeah. There's actually, we, I have it shared on, I think it's shared on YouTube somewhere way back in the day tech news today mm-hmm <affirmative> when, when Tom Merrit was, was with TWI and doing T T and I was, I was the, the board operator, you know, TD and I was, I wore glass through an entire episode and then released it on YouTube and it that's cool. And it was my perspective, switching the show and everything like that. You can see your hand and it was actually very easy
Mikah Sargent (00:49:42):
To do. Is it still up there?
Jason Howell (00:49:44):
It's gotta be, I, I don't know how to find it quickly. I definitely
Mikah Sargent (00:49:48):
Check it out afterwards.
Jason Howell (00:49:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I don't, I, and I don't even know if, if that's where I shared it, I can't remember to be honest, but it was so long ago, but I mean, it was my, my point being that it was really easy to do. Yeah. Like you set record and it would record until the internal storage was entirely full, you know, if you, that,
Mikah Sargent (00:50:06):
What I
Jason Howell (00:50:06):
Want. Yeah. And it was really useful, but that, and that ends up being kind of highlighting the difference between what you're talking about here. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> like a device that's created specifically for snap, which only really matters very much if you happen to be on Snapchat. Right. And, and care about spending a couple, a hundred dollars for a, a bonus feature slash functionality around sharing on Snapchat versus Google glass, which for all of its faults, certain aspects of it were open for interpretation. Yes. Like you could literally just use it the way you wanted to use it, see in
Mikah Sargent (00:50:37):
Different directions. And that's how I think, because I think that that provides more value for a thing so that I could look at this and go, okay, I'm not gonna use it with Snapchat because I don't use Snapchat, but this little drone that I don't have to worry about regulations around and that has two cameras on it because that's the other thing there's a downward facing camera that is just used to make sure that it raises and lowers from your hand. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> what if I could use that camera? You know what I mean? Right. That would be cool too. Then you could get an over the headshot, you wave up at the drone instead, but no snap has that all locked off. Someone will end up getting this thing and, and hacking it. Sure. But, you know, I don't think that it should even have to go that far.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:18):
And a lot of companies that are making different things. In fact just on the tech guy last week Dick D Bartolo showed this gadget. That's kind of cool. It's like a, a four by four rubiks cube instead of the, what is it? Three by three Rubik cube mm-hmm <affirmative>. And each of the cubes is a little Ellie or LCD screen. And so all of those screens light up and it is it's a game. Let me see well go to GWiz dot M E and we will visit the tech guy page because on there, okay. It's called the wow cube. And so it's got 24 screens and you can play, they have special games that you can play with it, but what's cool about the wow cube, which w O w cube.com. If John, you wanna pull that up is that they released an, they, they open source to the software so that you can make stuff for it.
Mikah Sargent (00:52:22):
They've got an SDK that's gonna be available and there's an emulator as well. And so you will be able to create little games for, for it. So this device. I really think, wow, cube.com is the better one. Cuz it'll have more visuals. This little device that's interesting is fascinating and it's very purpose built, but at the same time, people can create things for it. You can make little widgets for it. And that, that makes my brain, you know, go, Ooh, now I kind of wanna do this even more than, than the other. Yeah. So, oh yeah. Let's watch the a little bit of the through glass video.
Jason Howell (00:52:58):
Oh <laugh> yeah. If we can. So Burke, Burke actually located it and so I, I put it into our slack and, you know, into the chat room and everything, but yeah. It's a, it's a flashback me watching this. I don't know if you have access to a job, but yeah, so, and, and I mean the quality was, I mean the quality was fine. It was good enough. Yeah. I, I do wonder about the quality of the video that's recorded on the snap video. Like, I don't know if you could,
Mikah Sargent (00:53:25):
People were saying that the, the verge article said it's not viewing on a large screen. Yeah, it's fine. On an iPhone.
Jason Howell (00:53:33):
Right. Right. I mean, even the promo video that they released when I was watching it, I was watching it on a big screen. I was kinda like, eh, that video looks okay. But
Mikah Sargent (00:53:42):
What's that showing in the top left,
Jason Howell (00:53:43):
That's the actual a line cut. So that's the cut. So what you're seeing sorry, audio listeners. What you're seeing in the majority of the screen is from my, my Google glass doing all the control stuff. What you're seeing in the top left is the final product.
Mikah Sargent (00:53:57):
Okay. So you, you overlay the, and the post.
Jason Howell (00:53:59):
Yeah, I did that in post. Yeah. I
Mikah Sargent (00:54:01):
Thought, wow. I didn't know. It had enough processing college to stream live something in the corner of it.
Jason Howell (00:54:06):
Yeah. There it is. Wow. There's my nerdy self wearing Google glass. Sorry, audio, listen. That
Mikah Sargent (00:54:13):
Envision the idea that, you know, so anyway, it's cool. Snap do better. <Laugh>
Jason Howell (00:54:18):
Yeah, I know. It's I, I, I give them props for, for trying new things, right? Yeah. Like, it's cool that they're creating something like this, even, even though, and I think I probably said this when they did spectacles, even though at the end of the day, they're not gonna sell very many of these, but it's, but I applaud them for trying new things. Yeah. And you know, maybe this leads to a, a P a very portable selfie stick drone that that does work.
Mikah Sargent (00:54:46):
Yeah. I could see Amazon doing doing it and yeah, because it's Amazon and they've built out the a L E X, a API SDK and all that kind of stuff. It would be more open by default. Yeah. And they already do have a drone. That's a security drone for within your house. So Amazon, if there was an idea to steal, I think this one would be it because yeah, they've, they've got a much more open platform
Jason Howell (00:55:09):
That is surprising. They don't have it already. They've thrown so many, you know, so much
Mikah Sargent (00:55:12):
Spaghetti that they do have a lot of spaghetti projects and they've got the money to do it. Yeah. As snap, I feel like it is at least a little bit of a risk for them to be doing these different products. Cause hardware is not cheap to, to actually manufacture hardware. Yeah. So I feel like these are more just Evan Spiegel's desire to make fun things that he's thinking about totally. Versus it being something that you know is supposed to be profitable for the company. Totally
Jason Howell (00:55:35):
Agree.
Mikah Sargent (00:55:36):
Okay. moving on to my story of the week, this will be a quick one, cuz I think that everybody should go and watch the video that Joan stern of the Washington of the was Joanne stern of the wall street journal put together. Cuz it's hilarious. But they, Joan stern also put out an article to go along with it. And this is about autocorrect on iPhone. And I think this is especially pertinent because my partner was just complaining not too long ago about all of the things that got messed up on his iPhone whenever he would type them. And there was one <affirmative> that he and I, I, you know, I use all my tricks that I knew we did some research and there was one that we could not get figured out, but Joanna stern went to a duck farm.
Mikah Sargent (00:56:17):
And from the duck farm called the guy who used to work at apple, who made the first version of autocorrect for iOS and made him apologize to the duck for changing the F word to duck in autocorrect. But what's more interesting is that of course join stern, went into detail about how autocorrect works on iOS. And I think that this is, this is a really fascinating piece. So one of the things that folks should understand is that there are two dictionaries that are available in your iPhone. There's the static dictionary and there's the dynamic dictionary. The static dictionary is something that is built into iOS. It uses entries for common words and also some proper nouns like like product names and sports teams. When the first iPhone launched, there were more than 70,000 words in the static dictionary. There were likely a lot more.
Mikah Sargent (00:57:14):
Now this dictionary, as you might imagine, because it's called static does not change. Or I should say that those words are steadfast and true. They get added and you are, it checks against your what you're typing using this. The dynamic dictionary is the thing that gets people annoyed because the dynamic dictionary pays attention to what you are typing, how you are typing what you change after an autocorrect suggestion has taken place, all of that stuff to help determine what it is you're trying to say because our fingers typing on those small little keyboards are not necessarily pressing where we think they're pressing depending on the angle of the screen where, how, how big the actual touch surface of your finger that you're using to type all of that stuff plays a role in what the phone believes that you're typing.
Mikah Sargent (00:58:12):
And so when you type a certain word, whatever it happens to be, it looks at the letters that are surrounding it to try and determine if maybe you meant those letters to try and give you a suggestion. And as it make suggestions to you and you, you delete and change it. Then over time Joan stern said it's about three times, then it will log that and keep that information in mind. The other thing about this is that the, the keyboard that's paying attention it has even more kind of smarts, I think since iOS 14 iOS 13 or iOS 14 there are even more smarts that play a role in this because of apples. It's a, it's a feature called well it's machine learning across devices, but apple uses a thing called differential privacy in order to not have any identifiable information of an individual, but all of that information can be used in a way that maintains people's privacy, but comes together to understand how language changes and evolves over time.
Mikah Sargent (00:59:19):
Okay. So that if we suddenly start changing the spelling of a word or, you know, you start using words a little bit differently, then the autocorrect dictionary can get good get better rather at being able to properly make changes to how we speak. So it was I think Ken CAA, yeah. Ken Kanda who created the iPhone's autocorrect software. And CASAA when it came to bad words or you know, the, the, the foul language, whatever you wanna call it. Basically what CASAA had to do was make a list of bad word that's profanity, that's curses, that's slurs mm-hmm <affirmative> and put those into the static dictionary, but in a way that said, never give the user help with, with these words. Right. Meaning that you would not type the word duck and then autocorrect would correct it to the bad word, because the idea is that if, if you wanna use a bad word, then you need to make sure that's what you're typing. We don't want to assume that you're typing a bad word. Yeah. And then you accidentally send grandma a mean phrase. Apple
Jason Howell (01:00:30):
Would be in a lot of trouble if, if it just assumed. Yeah. Yeah. You want this
Mikah Sargent (01:00:35):
One. Exactly. Absolutely. So that was the first thing that, that, you know, was part of the original life. And that is why it often will change the F to duck because D and F are right next to each other on the keyboard. And if you're pressing, you may think that you're right on top of that F button, but actually the tip of your thumb is pressing the D the F and the G for example. And so, because G U C K is not a word, the nearest word that is not the curse word is D U C K. And so that may be why it suggests it. Now, there are some things that you can do if you want to improve your internal keyboard, or if you want to kind of change things. One of the, the tools is that there's an actual, there's actually a built in text replacement and engine in iOS.
Mikah Sargent (01:01:25):
And so you can go in and I won't go into depth here. You can read the article, or you can check out iOS today, cuz we've talked about this in the past, but essentially you can go in and say, when I type this word, there you go. When I type this word, then make sure that it is this word. So if you wanna make sure that when you type the bad word, that it comes out to be the bad word you would do that, I, for example, have little shortcuts that I have in place. So when, because I, I have to put my email into things a lot. I have a little shortcut when I type with the keyboards semicolon T w then autocorrect suggests Mica twi.tv, and then I can just hit space. So instead of having to type out M I K a h@twi.tv, I just type semicolon T w and then it autocorrects, it I've got one for my Gmail.
Mikah Sargent (01:02:17):
I've got one for my me account, all those different things. And so you can also use it for that. That's kind of what it was intended to be used for. Was little shortcuts. My address, I just typed semicolon a D D and then it autocorrects to my address cause I have to give that out frequently. And so all of those things are very helpful for the text replacement keyboard, but the best thing is if you've got phrases that always get autocorrected that you want to say, no, no, no, I meant this. Then that's how you can do it. But anyway,
Jason Howell (01:02:46):
I'm totally curious to know if I try and type it, if it corrects me, it
Mikah Sargent (01:02:49):
Just lets me, I am. That's what I was. So that was my curiosity is how often you have this as an issue on Google, because one of the things that Joanna stern suggest is using a third party keyboard, including Google's keyboard on iPhone because it will have a different kind of autocorrect library based on that.
Jason Howell (01:03:08):
<Laugh> all right. So it lets me do the F word. It lets me do a few others and then I and then I typed out shut as in shut the door and corrected it too. Oh,
Mikah Sargent (01:03:20):
To the bad word. Interesting. Cause maybe it was of what you had just been typing
Jason Howell (01:03:25):
Maybe. Yeah. It could be, could be <laugh> it's like, oh, well you just wanna go for it. All right, here
Mikah Sargent (01:03:30):
You go. Can talk to whoever it is at Google that handles that. So I can get that side
Jason Howell (01:03:33):
Of it. I did not expect that. I did not expect that. That's hilarious.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:36):
So yes that is the wall street journal article. Definitely. And watch the video. It's hilarious. That's and fun.
Jason Howell (01:03:43):
I wonder, I wonder the differences between how Google does it now.
Mikah Sargent (01:03:45):
Yeah. I would love to know that. Yeah. Maybe someone can do that experiment of, you know, having the phone side by side. And, but the problem is you need to be able to have the finger press in exactly the same way, you know, so you'd almost have to use like a robotic hand, right. To make sure that it get it's pressed with the, the, the tip of the finger touching wherever your finger does on both phones. Yep.
Jason Howell (01:04:06):
Yep. Interesting. All right.
Mikah Sargent (01:04:08):
That's, that's my story of the week,
Jason Howell (01:04:10):
Right on good stuff. And we have reached the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. We've covered a lot of ground today. I have to say we do this show every Thursday, twi.tv/tn w go there. You can S been audio and video formats. Jump out to YouTube. It's all laid out super easy for you. Just click it and subscribe twit TV slash TNW.
Mikah Sargent (01:04:30):
And speaking of last week, I just got my B real notification. So I'm just go ahead and capture that right quick.
Jason Howell (01:04:39):
I'm not getting it cuz it's not on my phone because my phone had to get or wiped itself.
Mikah Sargent (01:04:44):
Oh, wait it wiped itself.
Jason Howell (01:04:45):
Oh boy. Do I, do I tell this story? BA okay. Real quick. Okay. Real quick. Android 13 beta came out Uhhuh and I was on the Android 12 beta. And this is the first time that Google's had two consecutive, two like side side by side betas running. Oh,
Mikah Sargent (01:05:00):
They're running both at the same. Okay.
Jason Howell (01:05:01):
Both of the same. So Google says, if you opt out 12 beta, it'll tell you that you require a factory reset, but don't listen to that sign right up for the Android 13 beta and your phone won't get wiped. And so I did that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and my phone got wiped, so I'm starting over and I still have to, I'm still installing everything, but anyways, but that's so's, it must be real for a second, but I, yes, it was super annoying. I lost a month's worth of things.
Mikah Sargent (01:05:25):
Wait. And so they're not anywhere they're not back up.
Jason Howell (01:05:28):
Well, I mean, some of the stuff, a lot of Google's account stuff is, is backed up to the cloud. So that's great. But all of my yeah, it's, it's, it's complicated. S like SMS messages.
Mikah Sargent (01:05:39):
No, that's not.
Jason Howell (01:05:40):
Okay. Yeah. Well, everything was tied to my account in the cloud and somewhere along the line, it refuses to back up for my previous version of, oh, because it was 12 a pixel. No, it, it, it shouldn't, it says that my, my pin is incorrect. It basically, it authenticates the encryption by entering the pin on your previous phone. Okay. And I'm entering the pin, you know,
Mikah Sargent (01:06:03):
You're
Jason Howell (01:06:03):
Putting in the right pin. I know I'm putting in the right pin and it's not doing it. And so I had to start over with everything, including all my settings for a Android.
Mikah Sargent (01:06:10):
Frustrating
Jason Howell (01:06:11):
Was I'm over it at this point. Like, I'm, I'm kind of like threw the, the weeds on as far as this concerned, but it's dumb. So a little extra cautionary point there for you. Yeah. But I will be back on be real. I was really enjoying it. I've been totally enjoying it. Good.
Mikah Sargent (01:06:25):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. All right. By the way, folks, if you want to get all of our shows ad free, while we've got a way to make that happen, you can check out club TWI for seven bucks a month. You get every single TWI show with no ads. You get exclusive access to the twit plus bonus feed that has extra content. You won't find anywhere else, including very soon, if not already, a, a ma ma this morning with John Ashley, that is Mikah asks me anything where I am talking to F different folks within TWI. I love that who are not in front of the camera about their work and also things outside of the work. We talked a lot about magic, the gathering this morning. It was a lot of fun. So you can check that out and then also access to the members only discord server.
Mikah Sargent (01:07:15):
That is a place where you can go and chat with your fellow club, TWI members, as, as those of us here at TWI, all of that twi.tv/club, TWI seven bucks a month. We'd love it. If you joined us there and supported us and the work that we do directly also folks who are using apple podcasts, you can check out the subscription that is available in apple podcasts. You just type in Tech News Weekly in the apple podcast, set up, you find the audio version, and you'll see a new button where you can tap to subscribe for 2 99 a month in doing so you will get the ad free version of the audio feed right there in apple podcasts, and that warm, fuzzy feeling, knowing that you're supporting us directly. If you'd like to tweet at me or follow me on social media, I'm at Mica Sergeant on many, a social media network, including be real <affirmative> or you can head to Chi wawa.coffee, C H I H Hua hue.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Check me out on Saturday with Leo. Leport hosting the tech guy. It's a radio show where we take your tech questions in the us and around the world. And on Tuesdays with rose Mary orchard for iOS today, where we answer questions about all things iOS, tvOS, watch OS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Jason Howellll. What about you?
Jason Howell (01:08:27):
You're busy. <Laugh> I'm at Jason Howellll. I also do all about Android twin.tv/a, a a, and then produce some of Leo shows behind the scenes as well. So, but if you wanna find me on social media, it's probably on Twitter at Jason Howellll and be real, which I can't. I got, I was just setting it up. I gotta get back into that, but any who big thanks to everybody in our studio who helps us do the show each and every week, John Ashley Burke Burke was all the, the one who successfully found that through blast video that we were talking about. So thank you for that Burke and thanks to you for watching and listening. We will see you next Thursday on Tech News Weekly. Bye buddy. Goodbye.
Speaker 6 (01:09:09):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor of ad Astra magazine, and each week I'm joined by Tariq Malik, the editor in chief, over at space.com in our new this week in space podcast, every Friday Tariq And I take a deep dive into the stories that define the new space age what's NASA up to when will Americans, once again, set foot on the moon. And how about those samples from the perseverance Rover? When are those coming home? What the heck is Elon must done now, in addition to all the latest and greatest and space exploration will take an occasional look at bits of space flight history that you probably never heard of and all with an eye towards having a good time along the way, check us out in your favorite podcaster.
