If you want to stay up to date on the latest tech news in about 5 minutes, subscribe to Daily Tech Edlines. New cars, use cars, electric cars, maybe even flying cars. Explaining football to the friend who's just there for the nachos? Hard. Tailgating from home like a pro with snacks and drinks everyone will love, and an easy win. And with Instacart helping deliver the snack time MVP's to your door, you're ready for the game in as fast as 30 minutes.
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Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Philip Les Howard-Yermish John Atwood and Lifetime supporter Martin. On this episode of DTNS Apple unveils the new MacBook Pro lineup, blockchain games are a thing and Ubisoft is expected to have a rough quarter. This is the Daily Tech News Show for Wednesday October 30 of 2024 from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwooy. Here in Salt Lake City I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer Roger Chang.
Folks it is a week that has just been full of Apple stuff and a few other things and we got games stuff to talk about today so I'm kind of excited to get into the show. I am too. Why does an Apple just pay to own the week and just get it over with you know just say it's ours, nobody else touch it. We get to have it. I think they kind of did. Let's get it to the quick hits. North American Polestar EV owners got some good news to today.
The entire lineup of Polestar vehicles now has access to the Tesla Supercharger Network in the US and Canada. This isn't a free upgrade as owners will have to buy a $230 adapter but they will get access to nearly 18,000 additional charging stations across North America. The NACS adapters that make charging at a Tesla Supercharger possible are set for delivery in mid November. Good news drivers.
Cloud storage company Dropbox is laying off 528 people or that is approximately 20% of the company's workforce. CEO Drew Houston calls this a transitional period. That's a quote in a letter to staff. As CEO I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it. I'm truly sorry to those impacted by the change. Dropbox estimates it laid out a total cash expenditure of $63 to $68 million on the layoffs.
Primarily in the form of severance and benefits and recognized $47 to $52 million of incremental expense. More than a quarter after, let me start that over. More than a quarter of all the new code Google is generating is AI. This has been reviewed by an accepted by engineers said Sundar Bicci CEO of alphabet on the company earning call Tuesday. This is a big milestone for Google and Mark's just how important AI is to the company.
Google is building a slew of AI products and using AI as a part of the building of those products, including custom AI chatbots built into Gemini, automatic AI note taking in Google Meet, a bunch of generative AI tools to help YouTube creators and more. That was fast. I mean, not you, but the use of AI over at Google's when I met. Shares and server makers, super micro. Me have heard of them. I've talked about on the show before.
We have dropped 30% on Wednesday after its auditor Ernst and Young resigned stating it was, quote, unwilling to be associated with a financial statements prepared by management. The accounting firm also raised concerns about the board's independence from CEO Charles Leang and quote, other members of management. Super micro has also not listed or is still not listed any financial statements for the year and is reportedly under federal investigation at the moment.
Teemu, the popular online marketplaces under the European Union's microscope, regulators are concerned that the platform may be turning a blind eye to the sale of dangerous or fake goods. The investigation will scrutinize Teemu's practices for spotting and removing illegal items, especially those that flout EU safety standards. This could force Teemu to tighten its controls or face hefty penalties as the EU cracks down on online marketplaces.
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Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. We all have dreams, dream home renovations, dream vacations, or sending our kids to their dream colleges. But finding straightforward ways to turn those dreams into realistic goals, that's where things get tricky. Meryl understands that. That's why, with a dedicated Meryl advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward.
And, having the bullet you're back helps your whole financial life move with you. So when your plans change, Meryl is with you every step of the way. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Meryl, a bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Meryl Lynch, Pierce, Fender and Smith Incorporated, registered broker dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC. Like I said at the top of the show, we're going to talk a little bit about Apple.
They have wrapped up this week of announcements with the official introduction of the new MacBook Pro as expected, Apple's most premium laptop will support the M4 chip. The MacBook Pro will also be the first device to support the Justin Nauz M4 Max. The new Pro's will arrive with the 14 and 16 inch variant with liquid retina XDR displays that have a peak of 1000 bits of brightness. 14 inch MacBook Pro ships with the M4 and a 12 megapixel webcam.
Both sizes ship with M4 Pro and M4 Pro Max options. The M4 Pro and Max come with underbow five, Apple rates their battery life is 24 hours. The longest Apple has claimed for any MacBook, 14 inch MacBook M4 MacBook Pro starts at 15.99. 1999 for the M4 Pro variant, 16 inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro starts at 24.99. The prices are pretty expected. None of that is super crazy sounding to me.
Finally beef with these announcements, these are good for everybody who was waiting around on MacBook bumps and is certainly the M4 bump in the portable format. I just don't like how everything is so spread out. On one day or one week or one announcement, we get no books are getting the M4. Last year it was the iPad Pro getting the M4. I don't know when we'll get M4 Max options in the studios, which is an interesting device for me.
I kind of wish these things were all kind of all at once and maybe that's just not how the their manufacturing pipeline works and that will never be the case. I think it would be a much more unified Apple if they could and we would all be presented with roughly the same decisions and choices at the same time. These are exciting, especially for Pro users. In particular, I think that that M4 Pro 1999 14 inch MacBook Pro sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
If I were in the market for a MacBook Pro, that would probably be the one that I would be getting. I think I'd probably bump them ramp up on it since they're coming with 16. I always like to be a little bit more. So I would go 2432 on the RAM, but I think that would be the one that would be right for me. I used to always think I need to have the highest in fastest process, you know, the highest in so it would be the max.
But I've come to understand that I just don't use computers to do that level of computing personally anymore. So I don't know that getting the, you know, the one with the M4 max would make sense for me. So I do believe that that M4 Pro is the sweet spot. Yeah. I think so too. I think that there's always going to be people who want the maximum one. It's interesting though, this announcement did not talk about MacBook Air models. They did not get an upgrade.
But we'll now start with the 16 gigabytes of RAM, which I think is important. So having that in the mix, we'll talk about the resties in a second. But I think that one's an important one to mention. Most people when they come to the table, at least if they're looking for a Mac notebook, they are trying to balance portability, battery, lightness, all that sort of stuff with professional or pro level features.
And I think the MacBook Air models have been pretty awesome in regards to power per dollar. The fact that they're now 16 gig RAM standard in my mind pushes those up, you know, up a little higher as an attractive option. So the truth is, I'm like you, I would not necessarily come at this as a power user per say. I can tell you that the M1 even is still a little overkill in some ways. I have an M1 Max studio that blows my mind in terms of performance overall.
And the idea of me jumping at an M4 for no reason except it's a new number and therefore, you know, it's faster and it's got all these things they tell me on stage or great. I don't know that I'm really going to get that much out of it for the kinds of use cases I bring to it. So maybe now more than ever, I would tell either existing Mac folks or people maybe looking to get their first Mac, this might be the time to really ask yourself, what do you plan to do with the thing?
It isn't necessarily going to be the best way to go by going, well, whatever the top one is, that'll ask me the longest. I think you're going to get long life out of all of these and I think you can land at a much safer price point than say 2499 for a MacBook M4 Pro. It just seems like crazy. Talk to me. I could do that. Yeah. The interesting thing that you said there about the Mac look air is that they're not getting processor bumps, but they did get bumped up in memory.
So the commission of wisdom as well, Apple intelligence is a thing now. So we're going to give these things more memory just to make sure that they can do that level of processing that will happen on board, but it goes to show that these older M1 and two, these older processors are not bad. They are, as you said, they are quite powerful. And Apple is, they're coming up with laptops like basically all companies do.
They come out with something new and more powerful every single year, but going from the M1 to the M2 to the M3 to the M4, these are significant bumps. So if you're in the market for a budget laptop, one of these airs with 16 gigs could be the way to go as well. Yeah. It's also not the same as say the phone cycle. And this is the interesting thing because Apple's phone cycle is often, Ben or has been for a long time.
Every year there's a significant reason, at least they advertise the significant reason why you need to get that year's model. And it's sometimes true, not always, and even less so now because we're just, we're at the top of the curve and features, feature parity is kind of sticking around for two, three generations of phones. But there's still this feeling of like, well, I'm not going to get that new weird button or that slider or that thing.
Whatever the little thing is that they've added to the new one. So I always kind of have that feeling that I need to get on that boat. On the max side of things, I think once they went to Silicon, the entry into Silicon to me represents the moment where everybody should jump into the pool. If you were going to go, that was when to go. I think there's a much longer tail though on when you need to upgrade from say that M1 mini you bought the day the week it came out of that M1 MacBook Air.
And now, like this might now finally be the time you'd upgrade, but I'll bet you're still feeling pretty good about that M1 or M2 that you picked up. That's the one weird kind of disparity between Apple's yearly chip bump for phones versus desktop.
And I don't know, your mileage may vary, but I think if you're somebody sitting there or the M2 or the M3 and you opted for more memory in the beginning of without them making a default, I think you're going to be in pretty good shape through this cycle. Yeah, well, this new MacBook Pro announcement marks the end of the Mac announcement stuff that's going on this week. We can see if we can make it Thursday and Friday without talking about Apple. I doubt that, but we'll see.
We are going to talk about some games though. So I want to change gears a little bit during Q2 earnings call in 2021. French game producer Ubisoft revealed its intentions to create blockchain games. Well, the company has followed through on the Stealth launch champions tactics. The Grimoria Chronicles last week, a PVB tactical RPG web 3 game on PC. Champions tactics is free to download, but requires a Ubisoft account and a supported blockchain wallet. Scott, I just got to ask, why?
Well, a lot of us are asking why. A lot of us asked why when they originally expressed interest in being one of the first companies in a big major studio slash publisher who would push for NFT associated gaming. It was really them and Squaresoft, Squaring-AK Squaresoft were the biggest names to announce this at the time. Squares backed off on this big time. And honestly, I thought internally Ubisoft had changed their mind because we weren't hearing anything about this.
And this launch was not a big launch. Hardly anyone knew about it. It's literally the definition of a Stealth game launch. This thing came out without any fanfare and any pre-announcements. Nobody was playing it on streams. Nobody knew it was time. It just kind of got slipped in there. So clearly, there's two things going on here, I think. They probably felt like there's some experimenting worth doing here. See what sticks, see what holds.
Is gamer sentiment against NFTs and really the entire industry sentiment against NFTs right now? Is that enough to stop us from having some success with this? We're never going to know unless we try, plus we put a lot into it, we may as well launch. The problem with that, or the only real problem I see with this, is Ubisoft is in a weird place on the whole. The whole company is kind of struggling. We're going to have a bunch more to say about this in our good day internet stuff later.
But the short of it for me is this. Ubisoft thought this was going to be a thing to get on too quick. That's an Ubisoft thing, by the way. Whenever there's a new trend, whatever it is, whether it was mobile in the very beginning, Ubisoft was one of the first major publishers to just go. They were like, rubber meets road, let's go. We're going to be in all up in this. Oh, there's an exclusive deal with Epic in their new PC Game Store.
We're going to be the biggest publisher to be ready to do six month exclusives over there. We're going for this. They always do this. That's number one. Doesn't surprise me about Ubisoft. What surprises me is how quickly sentiment turned against NFTs, the value in said NFTs dropped through the floor if there was much to begin with. Now they're just kind of in this place of, we may as well try it because we got the work done. Let's not throw it away. I think that's what they did.
But I don't understand is why don't they just erase the mention and NFTs in the description. If it's a thing that you think won't land very well to the point where you still launched the game in its entirety, why even make reference to it?
Why don't you say, like, hey, if they hadn't, I guarantee that would have been worse for them because the minute gamers start talking online about and big streamers and all the media influencers start talking about the fact that it requires a supported blockchain wallet. What that tells people immediately is that something in here is tied to that and they see that as scammy. They would notice that the characters and the stuff you're collecting in the game are non-fungible tokens.
So I think that there's no getting around it. You can't suddenly rename those things. In other words, people are going to know. And I think they were better to call it what it is. I also think them having a stealth launch probably better for them just makes less noise. And also it gives people the impression that they're not trying to shove it down everybody's throat.
I think this was a PR tactic for them, Roger, to do this soft launch and to be very careful about it, but also not try to PR their way into language that is meant to distract people from the fact of what it actually is. So it does give it kind of a chance to either sink or swim. I don't give it much time. I think that we're already having trouble with regular Ubisoft games, landing well and surviving and not being canceled or whatever.
I don't know why they think this won't, but maybe it's a, you know, maybe it's small effort. We don't know anything about how they made this stuff like that. I was going to say that we don't know anything about the team that was working on this. We are talking about Ubisoft and Ubisoft. I don't want to say they're known for this, but they are known to at times. To just cancel stuff out of the blue seemingly games that you thought were coming out that you were anticipating were coming out.
You were waiting for. Oh, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. That's not the case here. No one was really expecting this. I mean, granted they did announce it three years ago, but with all the bad press that NFTs have gotten in blockchain, unfortunately has been a victim of, you know, of NFTs, I don't understand. I do understand. I should say I'm not, I'm kind of shocked. I'm not shocked by them. I'm kind of shocked that they didn't just cancel this and let this go.
So I can only imagine maybe they had a small development team. Maybe the game is actually really good. And let's just put it out here. We're not expecting much. Maybe it'll do something.
Maybe it won't, but if it doesn't, you know, no harmful, no, no. I mean, it's kind of a shame because blockchain would have, I mean, the NFT is sort of soiled along with cryptocurrency of people's ideas about blockchain because blockchain would have a great, great legitimate use in gaming, whether it's, you know, maintaining leaderboards or any sort of scoring, you know, in online competitive settings.
I'm just wondering if this was either too far, too far along the track to cancel or it's sort of a stocking horse where it's there to kind of see improve if these sets of technology that they develop actually do work as intended and like the game itself is not really there to to to to catch you know anything, but rather to test this instead of technology. I think you're 100% they are testing this. They want to see how it goes. They don't expect much from it. I wouldn't either if I were them.
It's like Netflix and their gaming stuff. It's like, well, we'll put some stuff up online. Let's see what happens. I'm going to build it from there. That's actually I think a smart way to do this. I still think the long term use of blockchain in gaming and other technologies, but mainly in gaming is legitimate. There's a lot of reasons why this could be great.
What people don't want is that it tied to what they perceive as scammy technologies that are around blockchain, specifically NFTs, a little bit of cryptocurrency, but most of the time what what gamers want is stuff within the game. So if you're saying blockchains going to track scores, we're going to track an item that is very rare that I found first in the world and have that be a record forever. Those are interest. That's interesting.
When you tell me that I need to connect my blockchain wallet to it, now we're talking weird and I'm not interested. And like the in the in game purchasing is done either with the in game currency or cryptocurrency from your crypto wallet. Right. It does sort of give a give off a bad impression. Yeah. This this game from Ubisoft definitely has to let's wait and see what it does. And I'm not expecting much and because I'm not maybe it might actually do something. I may be expecting it, but maybe.
Yeah. So I ever thought about something on the show, but don't know our email address. Well, here it is. Email us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Follow is in the air and that cooler weather calls for an update in your skincare. Moisturizing is key to keeping wrinkles at bay. That's why we need a skincare routine that's easy, fast and gives us results. Plus, what if your products had thousands of five star reviews? Were natural and affordable? Well, say hello to Dime Beauty.
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Investing in Vols Risk, Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fender, and Smith Inc. registered broker dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC. So we're going to keep talking about gaming and we're going to keep talking about Ubisoft because Ubisoft doesn't have a blockbuster release coming out in its fiscal third quarter. That's why the company's finance chief Fedrick DuJ expects the company's bookings to be
down 39% year over year. Ubisoft confirmed guidance for the current financial year to March 31st after a September cut following the post-pollument of a new installment of its assassin Cree franchise by three months to February 14th. Despite recent setbacks, we are continuing to deeply transform Ubisoft in order to restore the level of creativity and innovation that built Ubisoft's success while delivering stronger execution and predictability CEO Ives Gumaugh said in a statement.
So it's kind of the same thing, but Ubisoft is not even like a quarter or two. It's been a year and a half that they've been kind of, come on, you're a big game developer, you should not be having some of the issues that you're having and I'm just wondering Scott, what is going on over this company? Well, so you made a good point about the last couple of years and I would even go further back than that.
It's been a while since they've had a massive hit and while they've had some decent games in a pretty decent flow, the big uptick during the pandemic didn't exactly serve them the most. Like a lot of other gaming companies, live services, that sort of thing really excelled during that time and even though they've all experienced a bit of a drop from that bubble, they never really had the peak and they, but they have experienced the drop because they are part of the overall ecosystem of gaming.
They, in particular with the Star Wars Outlaws game, have a game that by most standards, I should say most standards, most previous standards to the blockbuster culture we have now in gaming, this sold pretty well, well into the millions of copies that used to be enough in this business. If you sold a half a million to a million copies of a game, you were set and you were already for the sequel. It's not so true anymore.
These AAA games take a lot more work, a lot more effort, a lot more employees, a lot more cost and if you don't hit certain thresholds, they're considered not a success, especially when you're a public company trying to please shareholders. That's kind of what we have here. They've got a game that should have been a sure fire hit in a Star Wars game.
Pair that with Open World prowess over there to be softening out of make open world games in some ways they defined this generation or even the last generation of open world games. So much of what they did is sort of bedrock to those things. Why couldn't that be the ultimate success? Well, I don't know. Why couldn't their last Assassin's Creed beat expectations? Why couldn't the newest Assassin's Creed that was supposed to already be out, got delayed until early next year?
Why couldn't that have been on time? There are a bunch of these things that are kind of dominoes falling for them. For those who see it as just, well, this is just a 2024 problem for them. New, it's been going on for a very, very long time. We've got some games they've announced 10 years ago that still haven't seen the light of day and no news.
They've got some games that were announced 10 years ago that just came out last year in the form of Skolan Bones, their pirate game, and it did not meet expectations. They are also a company that has tons of studios. I forgot the latest number, but it was near a hundred studios around the world, Singapore, France, Canada, multiple student Canada, the States, Europe, everywhere. They don't have enough to show for that much infrastructure.
I mean, this kind of reminds me of sort of the pickle that GM found itself in. I still sort of finds itself in now, but where it's just stretched over all these different studios that it's overseeing, and it's just, you know, it's really hard to focus when, as you say, like near a hundred different studios, I mean, could that be? Like it's just, they're just too big, they're just too spread out.
They're too big, and they're also a company who's benefited from that growth during a time where that seemed to fit. It doesn't fit like that anymore. The competition is different now, and there's a lot of reasons why people would spend their gaming dollars in other places, and they've yet to prove that they're agile enough to be ready to handle those places, and they keep trying.
They've got games as a service games that are meant to compete with the likes of Fortnite, and that sort of thing, and they've either failed or they've been canceled. They're struggling to find out what their foothold is in the future, and it cannot be simply relying on old IPs like Assassin's Creed, which again, maybe a little hit in Miss in recent years, but generally speaking, they hit their good games.
They're probably the best cultivated IP that they have there, and they do a great job with those, generally speaking, there's a few dips here and there. But they can't be everything for this company that spans the world and wants to be as dominant as they want to be.
There's currently, there's not a lot of news about this, so we don't have much to say about it, other than there's an effort internally with both some of the co-founders, the family themselves that founded the company, and Tencent, who owns a good stake in this, figuring out a way to take it non-public and make it private again. If that happens, that may change things, that could improve things. They may sell themselves to Microsoft like everybody else.
There's a lot of options for them, and we don't know which ones they're going to take or which ones will make the most sense, or even if Microsoft wants to spend more billions on yet another. I mean, Roger, you made a good analogy. You compared them to GM, back when GM just had 19 billion different carburens. One of the complaints that a lot of gamers have is that you have a lot of games that all kind of feel like the same game, even though they're different games.
If you are an Ubisoft fan, while I like this game, I want to go get this other game because there's probably going to be good too, but it's awful like the game you just had, and that makes you not want to go get a game, a third game, a fourth game, a fifth game. It seems like maybe they should potentially go back to being a private Lihale company, where they can actually make some real hard decisions. You said over 100 games studios all over the world, that's a lot. That's a lot.
What does that look like? Does that mean that they close some of those studios, or they try to sell a portion of a section of the company in order to do that? The answer is yes, and that's the bad part. They're going to have to do that. They're going to have to diversify at the very least, and at the most, they're going to have to sell off parts of themselves to make this work, or the entirety of themselves to make this work.
Who knows how that stuff will happen, I just finished reading the Blizzard kind of tell all history book called Play Nice, came out a couple of weeks ago now. It's a very interesting look at Blizzard Entertainment, which there's a lot of parallels here. But one of Blizzard's biggest problem was they never really own themselves.
Part of the reason they never own themselves this day is because everything they did was so successful, but also required a big bump in infrastructure, whether that's servers, or underlying technologies to make it work, whatever it is, to be innovative, their expenses would exponentially grow along with their profit base. They would end up just being like, well, crap, we're out of money again, even though we're the most successful PC game maker right now ever.
The next stage would be the next stage, World Warcraft, the biggest example of this. That's why they ended up having to be purchased, bought, owned, went from Vivendi to Activision now Microsoft. They've never owned themselves because of this. Ubisoft's in a slightly different position, but a position like it nonetheless. Which is they're too big for their own bridges. So either somebody with a lot more capital needs to own and manage that, or they have to shrink it.
And my feeling is they're going to shrink it. That's my guess. Well, so we're definitely going to see something's going to have to give with Ubisoft because it's just not sustainable at the rate that they're running, the way that they're running. But folks, let's check out the mailbag. The Oshworner to share an idea about recycling iMac screens. They write, and this is based off of a conversation that Allison had on Monday's show.
Discussion where they were not liking to have to throw away perfectly good displays. We're talking about the new iMacs. We didn't like that idea either. So when we had a dozen or so 27 inch 2K and 5K Intel iMacs going out for service, we decided to find another option.
After researching, we discovered that it is relatively cheap and easy for an IT team to replace the guts of the iMac with an appropriate display controller from eBay, turning them into a very nice monitor for fraction of the price, while also giving them a second lease on life and keeping them out of the e-waste bin. We put Josh's parts list and directions in the show notes, so look them over there.
I love this idea because that's, I know a lot of people say I just can't get that iMac because I want to keep the monitor way longer than I might keep the Mac. And it's just wasteful. So this is a heck of idea. I didn't know you could do this, but this is pretty cool. I don't know either. It's very cool. It is one of those things that the kind of DIY as well as the right to repair group really kind of point at.
It's very wasteful, especially for a lot of these technologies that are kind of an integrated unit, whether it's an iMac, a laptop. There's still perfectly good service of parts inside. In fact, I have two laptops that have 1080p screens, but because they're both older, not Core i5 processors from seven years ago, not as speedy, the displays are still functional and they're still good for something.
And it'd be just so much better if these were designed in a way that you could, or at least the user could remove them, and then maybe spend a couple hundred bucks on extra parts, but turn it into a standalone display. Yeah. I remember back in iMac back in like 2011, 2012, which seems like it's been forever now, but we're only talking 10, 11, 12 years ago. Those were really nice displays. I mean, those were our first ones that they called, what they call them. Full HD.
Yeah, they were full HD, but they also did, they did more than 10 ap, they were like, you know, 5k or whatever, whatever they called them. I can't remember the name, but anyway, those are great displays, but 10, 12 years later, you're done with the other factors. You can't upgrade the OS, the other stuff's too slow, whatever, like any other computer component. No reason on this planet, we shouldn't make that.
Apple should have made it easy, but there's no reason we shouldn't be able to keep using those as displays. I would still have two iMacs here as displays if I knew what the crap I was doing to make that happen. Yeah, this is definitely a good idea. So thanks Josh for the email. And also thanks to you, Scott Johnson, tell folks what they can find you.
Well, if you like some of this gaming discussion specifically around the industry and the tech around it, you might really enjoy our show core, which happens on Thursdays. Not quite sure when we're recording tomorrow because of Halloween, but it will happen. And it's a great roundtable discussion about all these kinds of issues and a whole lot more. Do check it out. If you have time, that's over at frogpants.com slash core core. Patron sticking around for the extended show Good Day Internet.
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