Matt Geekab 1019 live from Las Vegas from CES 2024 for Tuesday, January 19th, also 2024. 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where, of course, we usually answer your questions. We share your quick tips. We share your cool stuff found. Today, Today, we're going to be sharing our cool stuff found and thoughts and reactions to the things that we have seen here over the first couple of days that we have been here at CES. And yes, we are at CES here in Las Vegas.
And we couldn't be here without our CES coverage sponsors, which are CarbonCopyCloner.com slash MGG, CoreCode.io slash MGG, and Collide.com slash MGG.
I'll talk a little bit more about them in a little bit. it for now here in las vegas nevada i am dave hamilton and here in las vegas nevada is pilot pete dave can you do me one favor sir no hop in your time machine and come back 10 days it's the 9th of january not the 19th did i say the 9th at the beginning of the show you said the 19th i did yeah really but that's okay okay we're back in time we're back in time linear and it's the
9th of january 10 18 yeah oh i did 10 19 because that's the show yeah and then i said january I knew there was something wrong, and I couldn't put my, like, yes. Okay. Couldn't put your proverbial thumb on it, but there it is. Oh, snap. I screwed it up, Pete. Yes, you did. And oh, snap is who I'm going to talk about first. Amazing. These people have hit it out of the park. There's just no two ways about it. You may recall me talking about this last year at the show.
They put an O-Snap on my machine, on my iPhone, and then I wanted to film them putting it on an iPhone case to show how easy it was. So Dave offered up his phone so he could then take it a few feet away and take that thing off his phone, and it remains on that case to this day, although it's in his son's possession. We visited the O-Snap booth earlier today. Boy, do they have some neat stuff. They have now the Snap 4 Lux, which goes right on. It's mag safe, but it's uber strong.
It's about as thick as a nickel. Your phone will charge right through that little pop socket. So, yeah, I want to take a second and just make sure people understand. It's basically, for those who know a pop socket, that's what OSnap does. Except it's super thin and you can charge through it. But it gives you a little handle to hold your phone. It does. It's awesome. And there's little video on their site that's worth going to look at because there's so many ways you can hold the phone now.
You can stick your finger through the little grip that it has that comes out. It makes a perfect kickstand. It's super durable. I love it. Everybody got stocking stuffers this Christmas from OSNAP. And they've got some other stuff coming soon. They've got a wallet coming, and they've got some mounts. So osnap.com. These things are not cheap, but you get what you pay for. These are quality products that are super durable.
I got to say, the other thing that I thought was the –, The mount for the grip looked a little plasticky and flimsy, and I thought it would last a couple weeks at best. The initial, yeah, the one we got last year. Yes, and it still works great. And, oh, by the way, I actually stood on mine and scraped it across a concrete deck, and it gouged it a little, but it's in perfect working order. Hey, Pete, don't do that again. I promise. Okay, great.
So, yeah. Oh, I'll not hit the – I won't do that again either.
There hit the table and rattle rattle rattle yeah well it's good because you have your uh you're still wearing your ces badge while we're doing this so that's rattling and rattling but to take that off would require some acrobatics that i i don't know that you're ready to do yeah well i'll tell you what i'll mute my mic while you start talking about the next item and i'll make it happen and you can all watch if you're on video so the next item is related to this it is you know No,
everyone is talking about here at CES, everyone's talking about Qi 2. Every company that you can imagine that has any sort of wireless charging device is talking about Qi 2. It's all coming soon. Some people have devices that are Qi 2 now, but lots of it is coming in the next couple of months. And yes, all your favorite chargers, the stuff from Anchor, the stuff from BaseUS, the stuff from everybody is doing ChiTu. The question that seems to be on people's minds is, what is Qi 2?
I had that very question last night, Dave. Yes. What's the difference? So the difference is that, and it's easy for us Apple users, especially current iPhone users, to forget that Qi is not magnetic, right? We use it magnetically with something we've come to call MagSafe, although you can buy things that aren't officially MagSafe. So they are magnetic, Qi, right? And, you know, all that stuff. So Qi 2 was inspired by MagSafe.
And in fact, Apple was involved in sort of helping to find the standard with the wireless power consortium. But Qi 2 has magnetic power profiles built into it, baked into it. So it is it is part and parcel. The magnet part that we have come to rely on with MagSafe is basically now just a part of Qi 2. Initially out of the gate, it will support a power profile of up to 15 watts, just like MagSafe. But there is talk of that being raised over time.
In fact, there are companies out there. I think we talked to the folks at Zag, well, Mophie, and Mophie's got a Chi2 power pack that actually delivers, I think they said 21 watts of power. Your phone gets a net 15 watts because there's always going to be loss with, you know, through heat and just dissipation that's happening with the fact that it's wireless power, you know, or proximity power. So, yeah, Chi, too, is primarily Chi with magnets, so...
There is a difference between Chi2 and MagSafe, but I certainly can't articulate it. I suppose the best one is it's not just for Apple devices. And that's what Chi2 is. So the answer is we all want Chi2. And the benefit to us as consumers is multifold, right? One of the benefits is because it's not just Apple only, there will be more manufacturers making stuff for it. Not that there's a shortage of iPhones to market to, but it opens up the market for it.
So there'll be some interesting iterations and sort of feeding into that is that Apple doesn't have to approve it in order for it to be Qi 2 like they do with MagSafe. So prices will likely come down. There is still a Qi 2 approval and that is not free. However, it's going to be less than it is. So like all those kind of Chi things that are maybe $150, you know, for like the three in one, those we might see come down to $99 for a three in one, you know? Yeah.
They're not going to come down to the $35. Like we see with the, you know, the Chinese stuff on Amazon, that's not mag safe, but it's magnetic. And it lasts almost two weeks too. Oh, at least sometimes. Yeah. At least 13 and a half days. That's right. Yeah. So that's, uh, that's Chi too. Hopefully that helps. Yep. Very cool. Yeah, that was fun to see that. And he did mention Mophie. The juice pack is back. Yeah. For those that knew and loved the juice pack back in the day,
the phone case with the battery built in is coming back from Mophie. Yeah. The second thing that I wanted to talk about today was a pretty cool little company that we went and saw, and they're called Idyllic. Idyllic Technology. And that's their website, idyllic.technology. Cool. What do they do? But what do they do? But wait, there's less. I had no idea what they did, but they do less. It's essentially a cross between a barcode reader and a near field communication and an NFC chip.
It would be RFID. I'm sorry. RFID. Yeah, RFID than NFC. Yeah. But they wanted to solve for the fact that sometimes the barcode on a package gets destroyed. Or the barcode, how often have you been standing at the grocery store trying to check out and the cashier hits all seven sides of a box before she finally finds the barcode to scan it and check you out? They solve that and they solve the cost of the RFID, which has the little antenna
and the chip in it and all that. And then that's not that good for the environment and all that good stuff. What they have developed is basically a card that has various sizes and shapes of metal. They appear to be metal bars in the card. I don't know what they're made of. I didn't ask that question. But they appear to be metal bars. They're metal. They're some sort of metal. Yeah. And he said it senses frequency
between three and six gigahertz. and it bounces it off that metal almost like a sonic thing, he said. And he said, for lack of a better word, it plays a song. And it's like a barcode. Each one is unique for every product. All the package delivery person has to do is run the box by the little antenna as he's taking it off.
Or all the cashier would have to do is take the box of Quaker Oats and run it right across the little antenna that's sitting on the counter, and it will read it much like an RFID but without the expense and much as efficient as a barcode without needing to point the barcode at. The thing. So the downside is this is not technology that you and I can go out
and buy and enjoy, but it is amazing technology. It's an amazing solution to the problems that have been facing the barcode and RFID folks for years. And I think in the future, we'll help bring down things like shipping costs. And even grocery costs. It saves time for every second that they are able to save. They're paying somebody. They're getting more people through, more throughput. And they say that an RFID costs about a nickel?
I think that's what he said. And then there's e-waste from it, of course, because there's actually a chip in it. This is less than a penny for the little card. And it's just metal and cardboard. Fascinating. This is what we love about CES is coming here and finding. Certainly, we find cool products that we can actually put on our phones and put in our hands and use. But then sort of getting the insights into what is going to fuel the next things that are coming.
Right. And I love that. In fact, I want to talk about one of those things, which is Wi-Fi 7. I do want to take that minute I promised and share a little bit more about each of our CES 2024 coverage sponsors. Mac Updater is available at corecode.io slash mgg. This is one of my favorite apps. It allows me to keep all of my apps up to date on my Mac. So I don't have to think about it. So when I go to launch an app, it's already up to date.
I'm not getting the notification the moment I launch it that says, hey, do you want to update? And it's like, not right now. So corecode.io slash mgg collide, k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash mgg. Collide ensures that only secure devices can access your cloud apps. It's zero trust, tailor-made for Okta. And you can go to collide.com slash mgg to book a demo today. And of course, our thanks to Collide for being one of our CES coverage sponsors.
And then cccbackup at bombic.com slash mgg. That's b-o-m-b-i-c-h dot com slash mgg. If you are looking for something better than Time Machine, more flexible, visit carbon copy cloner.com bombic.com slash mgg carbon copy cloner.com slash mgg works you get 15 off of ccc with code mgg ces24 i love this app too you can see all of these show notes and get all of these links at macgeekup.com of course wi-fi 7 is so it is a new standard right Right.
It works across three bands and it can work across them simultaneously to provide extremely high throughput. In fact, that's those are the words in the spec. That's like, you know, capital E, capital H, capital T, extremely high throughput. So it's combining two point four gigahertz, five gigahertz and six gigahertz to make sure you're fully utilizing the whole spectrum. You know, it kind of expands on what Wi-Fi 6 did, which was mainly focused on supporting lots more devices simultaneously.
This then adds more speed. It does that not only by combining all three bands, but it has this ultra wide 320 megahertz bands. It's got a different qualm that it's using to modulate the data stream so that you fit more in it. And it's, you know, speeds can be up to 46 gigabits per second. Is that all? Yeah. But you're really going to get gigabit Wi-Fi speeds with this, right? And then some. Right. Once again, the bottleneck is going to be the pipe coming into the house.
Correct. No longer the Wi-Fi router. But within the house, you're getting all those speeds to your NAS and all this stuff, and you've got better network capacity. The interesting part comes in the devices that we've seen.
And uh you know we've seen a few companies that have their wi-fi 7 stuff here they are out some of them are out in the market some of them are coming soon but the prices on these are not low and and that's an understatement uh you know if you like at pepcom last night i talked to the orbi folks that are the netgear folks about the orbi um a three pack of the orbi 970 which which is a quad band Wi-Fi 7 mesh capable system, right? The three pack is $2299.
And there's a comma in that number, folks. Yeah, not a decimal. Not a decimal point, right. So that's $2299. A two pack, $1699. A one pack, which is one, obviously, $899. You can get their Nighthawk RS-709 tri-band standalone router for $699. These are all four by four. And there are various configurations. The Orbeez have some 10 gig ports and some two and a half gig ports. So you can really kind of take advantage of all that bandwidth. But it's not inexpensive.
I always, whenever we talk about mesh, eventually I wind up talking about TP link. We met with the TP link folks, and it is important to remember. And I, I say this to remind myself as much as all of you TP link, because of the scale at which they produce things and the, the scale at which they simply are a global force, they are able to be disruptive on the pricing side without sacrificing on the quality side.
So the tp-link three pack for the deco be63 is seven about seven hundred dollars that's incredible right still very expensive yeah come for a three pack for a you know for a mesh system but one third the price correct correct yeah and they're uh they're um the standalone routers you can get for $249. $299 in that range. They've got a flagship model coming out, the BE900.
They didn't quite have pricing on that for us today, but I think that's going to be probably $349, $399 if I had to guess, but we'll get data on that and share. But it's important to remember that TP-Link's out there and likes to be disruptive by pricing, and they can do it because they do so much scale.
Certainly they are a presence here in the united states but most of their business is done elsewhere so even though we only see it we see a trickle of it here even though we see plenty at tp link here so yeah so that's wi-fi seven that's um yeah yep and they've put a whole smart home together too so we'll talk more about that yeah obviously going forward but yeah oh man was that kind of cool Yep. What's the last thing you got for us, Pete? So I, of course,
brought another cool stuff found that you can't go out and buy. Sorry. I hate to do it. But it's tech that's going to fuel other tech, right? It is tech that's going to fuel other tech. And I talked to two companies that are both basically selling to OEM.
The cool thing that they're going to do is reduce batteries, remove the need for batteries, and make ambient solar light within the home, ambient light within the home, power things like your television remote, your keyboard, your mouse, all these things that you either need to recharge or put AAA batteries in and that sort of thing. That's what they're going after. So the first one was AmbientPhotonics.com. So ambient light, yeah. Yeah. That was cool. And they have developed an ability.
These companies use two different technologies, but they've developed the ability to make ambient light in the home. Enough to power these smaller devices, whereas before they both used the example of, remember it was the old LCD calculators. Yeah. that had the little solar chip on it, and that's about it. And they were showing, you know, there are solar keyboards out there now, but the solar strip is the entire length of the top of the keyboard.
They had these things down to about 10% to 15% of the real estate that those had. They say like three times the amount of juice out of it, right? Per square inch. Per square inch or per square whatever, right? So something that has the surface area the size of maybe your thumb will power a keyboard.
And and then the one the other one that they showed was a little i think it was a roku remote or it was a fire it was a fire stick remote yeah yeah and they had put the the solar panel in both sides so if someone just threw it on the couch and it went face down it was still getting the charge that it needed to be to be operable and then the second company that i talked to was It was Solaire's, and so that's S-O-L-A-I-R-E-S. And is that Solaire's.net? It is. I think it is, yeah, yeah,
yeah. Yeah, Solaire's.net. And they're doing the same thing. So powering everything from smart door locks to wireless keyboards and scales and watches and electronic shelf labels, they say. So any of those things. I know that when my lock dies, the batteries in my lock die down in Florida, I got to go down there and manually change it. Or call somebody down there and say, yeah, hey, go change those eight double A's or whatever. So this is the type of thing that's coming.
Can't go out and buy it today, but people are putting a lot of thought and effort into lowering the footprint of these things. And making them more efficient for us and improving our lives. It's cool stuff. No, it's tech that fuels other tech. I mean, I think that's the theme of this episode. Absolutely. Don't get me wrong. We are seeing and finding and going to be covering. And we're going to bring a bunch to you. Lots of the tech that we can touch.
Watch our YouTube channel. We are putting out sort of product-specific videos of things that we found, little short, you know, one to three or four minute, maybe, you know, but, but short little things that, uh, that, you know, you can actually see the, the, what we saw on the, on the show floor at the various press events, but, uh, yeah, find our YouTube channel, you, uh, youtube.com. I'll put a link to it, but I think it's youtube.com slash at Mac e-cab or something.
I'm sure. In fact, I'm, I'm sure that's what it is. There you go. Yeah. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Folks, it's a blast. We have to go off to our next Showstoppers event. So that's yet another one of these things where there's lots of people there to talk to the press and show them. And it starts in 35 minutes, and it's probably about 20 minutes away, Pete. Time that we bounce out of here. So we've got to go. We've got to go. It's time to go. Thanks for hanging with us, folks.
Are you saying it's time to stop the show, to go to Showstoppers? No, he had to do it. Sorry, folks. There we are. That's fun. We're having too much fun. It's great. We're exhausted. By the end of the day, we get a little punchy, and we're not even close to the end of the day yet. So you do the math. This might be our last full episode from CES, but Monday, another show will come out. He's got to put up with me the rest of the night. I know. Until then, folks, don't get caught.
Made on Math. Made on several Macs.