Ring makes its cheapest video doorbell yet, but there is a catch. Who's the winner In smartphones? Another streaming service raises prices? Plus Your tech questions answered? What's going on? I'm Rich Dmiro and this is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about, and it's where I answer the questions you send me. My name is Rich Dmiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Hope you're
having a fantastic day. So I finally did something that I've wanted to do for so long. This has been a project that is I don't know, evaded me for many, many years. I took down my NASS, which is my network attached storage drive, probably a couple of years ago, like maybe two three years ago.
It's probably two years ago.
I never set it back up again, and I just always wanted to, but I never got around to it. And so finally I've been running up against this problem. It's this whole Google thing charging for storage that has really gotten me to clean up my act with my cloud files. So I wanted to back up my Google Drive to the NAS and then move a bunch of files in the Google drive to the NAS, and NAS means network attached storage. It's basically a hard drive that plugs into your network so that you can access it
from all your computers. And you know, you can have these big hard drives in it. Right now, I've only got like a four terabyte in there. But ideally what you do is you mirror the drives and that way, whatever you put on the one drive copies to the other drive, and so if something ever happened to one of the drives they fail, you've got the other drive, and so it's kind of a fail safe method for
backing up your stuff. You should also have your stuff in a third place, which is, you know, a cloud or the original file itself, which in my case would be Google Drive. But anyway, I finally did this. I finally SYNCD my Google Drive to it, and now I'm ready to move out this giant batch of files and free up some space on my Google Drive. And it's a long story what the files are, but they're basically the old Google photos files, and so I'm not sure
this is what I don't know just yet. I don't know if those Google file Google photos files are actually taking up storage on my Google drive right, like my quota of two terabytes, I'm not sure. I don't know, so when I move them out, I will find out. I have a feeling they are, but I don't know. Originally they were not, and then I feel like maybe they are now. So anyway, the network attached drive is great because you just have a ton of storage that you can just move files between. And it's been a
lot of fun. The one I have in case you're interested in, is from snology sy no l O g Y Snology. I have the disk station and it's an old one, but I looked up the new one. It's the DS two twenty plus, which is kind of the consumer solution.
It holds too hard drive and was at USBC on the front.
No, it's just regular and that is three hundred dollars on Amazon. I believe I paid a little bit less than that, but anyway, really cool, and I'm you know, I'm trying to not pay extra for Google Drive at this point because now they're charging for everything in my Google Photos. They're charging for that starting soon, so I want to make sure that I don't have anything in my Google Drive. And those two terabytes I pay ten dollars a month for any more than I need in there,
like I only need the absolute essentials. So I'm going through my whole drive file by file and just making sure that it's all cleaned up and ready to go. Let's move on to the first story in today's podcast.
Thanks for listening.
By the way, Apple crosses one billion active iPhone users for the first time this according to nine to five Mac, Tim Cook, in an interview with Reuter, said they have one hundred one point sixty five billion devices active, but one billion of those are iPhones. Can you imagine a billion iPhone around the world. I mean, this company is just printing money all those iCloud messages every day. Oh you have no more storage in your iCloud. We couldn't
back up your phone. Oh charge me some more. They last time they mentioned how many active iPhones, it was nine hundred million in twenty nineteen. That's a lot of phones and Apple is just killing it. The latest numbers from IDC, who tracks this stuff, that's International Data Corporation. The fourth quarter was really good for smartphone makers and
really really good for Apple. In the top five Apple number one, they sold ninety million phones or they shipped I should say, I don't know if that actually means they sold them, but I think that means pretty much the same ninety million devices, and mostly that was driven by the the iPhone twelve. How successful that is, So ninety million phones in one quarter, I mean, that's just phenomenal.
Samsung number two with seventy three million, well, let's round it up to seventy four million now the twenty nineteen Q four. So just to give you an idea of how many people upgraded in twenty twenty versus twenty nineteen, seventy three, let's say seventy four million were sold in twenty nineteen the last quarter, compared to ninety million for Apple, sixty nine million. Well, let's say seventy million for Samsung versus seventy four million. So both companies did see an increase,
which is pretty amazing during a pandemic. But for Apple that increase was very dramatic and very pronounced. The rest of the companies, there's really no competition anymore. There's only Samsung and Apple, and the other ones are all Chinese manufacturers Jaomi.
Appo and Huawei.
And Huawei has been hit really hard. I think on this very podcast I mentioned how Huawei was like number one for global shipments and now for this fourth quarter of twenty twenty they're down to the one, two, three, four fifth. But if you take it big picture, for the whole year in twenty twenty, Samsung number one, Apple number two, Huaweih number three. So it's interesting. I'm obsessed with smartphones. I love them.
Today.
The Samsung Galaxy S twenty one series is out best Samsung devices in years. I will say it again. If you're gonna upgrade your Samsung, do it this year. The phones they came out with are just phenomenal. The S twenty one series is fantastic. I find that the S twenty one Ultra, as I find with a lot of these big phones nowadays, it's just too big. And I love that phone and I want to carry it around. I want to switch to it, but I can't. It's just too big. I can't carry that thing in my pocket.
I always use the kind of the wedding as the example. You know, if you're dancing at a wedding, could your phone be in your pocket? With the Ultra no Way, no Way, iPhone twelve pro, Yes, Samsung S twenty one, Yes, S twenty one plus I'm not sure. I have not held that one yet, but that would be probably. I gotta say the S twenty one is a perfect size. It's the same exact size as the I Phone twelve Pro and the iPhone twelve. So if that's you know, if you like a nice size phone, nice screen size,
but not giant, go with the S twenty one. It's a great little device, and I have not found any problems with it whatsoever. I wish it had a little bit more memory. It has eight gigs of RAM. I wish it had closer to the I think the Ultra comes with sixteen or twelve, but I wish it had that. I think the Ultra sixteen. But anyway, let's get to a.
Question, shall we. Jody Wrights, Hello, they're rich.
I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for wireless earbuds that are not over one hundred dollars sent for my iPhone. You know, it's funny when people send me questions, I generally get a little indication of the answer I should give them with how they're sending me. So if it says sent for my iPhone, generally I will recommend AirPods ten out of ten times times because air pods are amazing. They sync with the iPhone, they seamlessly switch between devices.
They're just perfect.
Now, Jody is asking me for something under one hundred dollars, and generally you can't get the air pods for under one hundred dollars. So in that case, I will defer to two different pairs of headphones that I've liked in the past year. Number one are called the Let's Fit T thirteen. They are dirt cheap under thirty dollars and they work fantastic. I will say for under thirty dollars, the Let's Fit T thirteen are just great, not a
lot of fuss. They work great, they charge fast, the battery lasts, they stay in your ears, they feel good, they sound good, and actually sound amazing. So that's my number one pick.
Now.
The second pair that I like is from one Plus. They made a pair this year called or last year called the one plus buds Z. These were fifty dollars and I find myself going back to them over and over. They're excellent and they stay ears. They had a little problem at the beginning where they were pausing during workouts a lot because there's something with the sensor, but I think they fix that with the softwareupdates. I don't really see that happening much anymore. And those are fifty dollars.
You might be able to get them cheaper online if you look around, but those are the two that I recommend, and they will both cost you under one hundred dollars, and I think you'll be very happy with either pair.
Jody, thanks for the question. Now.
I don't know if you're following what was going on this week with Robin Hood and these stocks, but these Reddit traders were pumping up the prices of these random stocks like game Stop, BlackBerry, AMC movie Theaters. I think American Airlines was in there at some point, but oh, they have them.
All listed here BB. I think that's best buy.
But what they did was they pumped up the prices because all of these hedge fund traders apparently. And I'm not a stock market person, believe me, I know nothing about this. I only do mutual funds. That's the only thing I invest in. I don't do individual stocks. I set it, I forget it, that's it. I don't even look at it again ever again. I just put the money in and leave it there. So that's my way of doing investing. I just don't really put a lot
of thought into it. I figure, you put it in early, and you'll leave it in there for as long as humanly possible, and hopefully when I retire something will be made off of this stuff. But these people are you know, if you know what you're doing, you could day trade and you could make money.
I guess I, you know. I to me, it's just much too much work.
So this whole thing of robin Hood is is one of these apps that people were using to buy these stocks, and apparently they stopped people from trading these random stocks like game Stop and you know all these other ones.
And the Robinhood traders were pretty mad because they were all on Reddit, and you know, from everything I read what they were doing, there's really nothing wrong with you're you're allowed to unless someone was giving false information or you know, putting out misleading information or insider information about the companies. Like what they were doing seems to be legal from everything that I saw.
Now, is it right? I don't know.
I mean that's a whole nother topic, you know, I think what the the bottom line about all this is that we are seeing the use of the Internet and social media to coordinate things in ways that we never imagined, in ways that were never possible before. And we're going to continue to see this. We are going to continue to see social media enable things that we never thought was possible in our society. And I'm telling you, the
implications of this stuff is very, very far reaching. We've seen it with election We've seen it with protests, We've seen it with anything where you can get a whole bunch of people together all at the same time and move things in big ways very fast. And sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not so good. I'm just saying that we're going to see more of this, and I'm not sure that the social media companies can keep up with the implications of their technology.
Now.
A lot of this is inspired by that documentary on Netflix that I watched, This Social Dilemma. It really resonated with me because we know, when I was a kid, you'd go on the BBS, right the bulletin board system, and you'd write something, and you know, you'd go to sleep and you'd wake up and you'd see a couple replies to what you said. It was really cool. Now you talk about teenagers posting on Instagram, and they refreshed their Instagram posts so fast to see how many likes
they're getting and how many comments they're getting. If they don't get enough in a certain amount of times, they delete their post. That's how immediate gratification we have gotten to in our society. And so same thing here with this Robinhood stuff. These people just banded together, they decided to do what they wanted to do, and it worked. They got these stock prices up and up and up. But then all of a sudden, robin Hood said never mind, you can't trade. And they're like, wait, hold on, is
that is that what you're allowed to do? Because I didn't realize that was in part of the terms of service. So they went on Google Play. They gave it one hundred tons of one star reviews. They are asking for Apple to remove robin Hood from the App Store, and I think we're just gonna see this kind of shake out more and more because I guess they were trying
to stick it to the man. The hedge fund folks, who I guess have like giant short positions in these big you know, in these in these in these troubled companies like game Stock, and when game stop stock starts going up and up and up, these hedge fund traders lose their shirts and they lose a lot of money. And I'm simplifying this in a way that I this is what I understand from this, but it just it was wild. I was looking at these stock prices and wow, uh no, it did not tempt me to jump in
or jump out. And so that's that's kind of my thoughts on this stuff. But it's pretty wild to watch, that's for sure. I have a little sip of my tea here. Annabella says, Hey, rich, I wanted to talk to you to ask what device do you recommend to download and store pictures from my iPhone? I have over thirty six thousand pictures currently on my phone. Whoa any and need to do something to save them and delete them from my phone? Anything you can recommend, TIA. I'm
guessing that means thanks in advance. Thank you, Annabella. Okay, this is a great question, and thirty six thousand pictures on your phone that is a lot. I would recommend a couple things. So number one, you can go with something like this synology that I recommended that earlier in the show, but that seems to be a very it's kind of a a you're putting a fire hose.
On a on a I don't know what would the term be? A matchstick?
Is that even like a phrase sounds good though right you're using you know it's it might be too much for your what you need.
So a couple of things you can do.
Number one, if you want a free solution and an easy solution, just get Google Photos. Install that on your phone, let it go to work. It will back up all thirty six thousand pictures and then it will give you a message when it's done, and it will say now you can go ahead and delete all these pictures from your phone.
It will actually do that for you. That's one way of doing it.
The downside of that is that I would recommend at this point don't use high quality for Google Photos anymore, because there's no point that they're not giving it away for free anymore, So why you're going to degrade the quality of your pictures. So in that case, you would
want to spring for Google Storage. You get fifteen gigs, which might hold your thirty six thousand pictures, depending how big they are, or you might have to pay a little bit more each month, maybe three dollars a month to store all those I think that's perfectly reasonable, and
I think that's a great way to do this. If you want something that's more integrated with the iPhone, you can just go ahead and sign up for iCloud and you can get fifty gigs of iCloud storage for I think it's a couple bucks a month, three dollars a month I pay, or maybe I pay for two hundred gigs. Let's see iCloud storage pricing. Let's see how much your
pricing plan is for this. So with iCloud in America, it's fifty gigs for ninety nine cents, which I think would hold your pictures, or two hundred gigs for three dollars a month. Either way, you're looking at under three hundred three dollars a month. So a year, that's thirty
six dollars a year. Now, if you don't want to do the cloud route, which it sounds like you might not because you're asking me this question, so you may not want them in the cloud, I would say the next best thing is probably this device called eb that's ibi. It's made by sand Disc. It's very similar to the synology that I was talking about, but it's just for pictures and it's.
It's very simple.
You install the EB app on your phone, you hook up this hard drive to your Wi Fi at home, and next thing you know, every time you open up this app on your phone, it will back up the pictures to this hard drive. And it's store not in the cloud, It's stored on the drive in your house. Now, the danger of that is that your photos are not properly backed up because you need them in two places. So I'd want to see them on this hard drive and then somewhere else as well, And so for that reason,
I'd probably go with the iCloud. I'd go with a combination of two things. I'd probably go with like an iCloud storage or Google Photos. Maybe do Google Photos for free as much free as you can get, and then go with the EB for the rest of it. The EB is like a hundred bucks for one terabyte, so good question. I get that a lot, but back up those pictures. Back up those pictures. You do not want
to lose your pictures. I get so many emails from people saying, rich is there any way to recover my pictures anyway.
And I say, did you back them up?
Because yeah, it's really easy when you back them up, and they say, no, I didn't back them up, and I say, I don't know what to say because I always talk about backing them up. You're not listening to this podcast, and I get it. A lot of people aren't, but a lot of people are. But I know if you're listening to the podcast, you probably are backing up now, full disclosure. Right now, at this moment in time, my Google Photos are not backed up. And so that's a
big old for rich DeMuro. And again that is what I'm working on with my This is all part of my snology plan, because I am working on a plan to get my Google Photos backed up on a reasonable schedule. And you can actually do this, by the way, in something called Google Takeout.
They will. It's a little complicated, but.
What they can do is they can automatically export your data to a cloud service on a schedule, so on a on a regular basis, you can have your Google Photos backed up to a random you know, like these various let me see.
What I think.
I talked about this on the show before. But you can have your Google Photos backed up to like a cloud service. And this is my ultimate plan. So look at export every two months for one year, and you can back up to Google Drive, which is what I'm gonna do. So my goal is to basically I need to free up my space on Google Drive so that this can just back them up to Google Drive regularly. And then you can also do Dropbox. You can do
one drive and you can do Box. So again you would just have your photos backed up every two months for a year, so you don't have to think about this and your photos are backed up in a physical place. That's what I recommend, all right, Sling TV, we talk about these streaming services. We talk about how everyone wants to cut the cord to save money. Guess what we've all learned. The cutting cord saves you exactly zero dollars unless you are only subscribed to one streaming service like
you know, like Netflix or some thing. But in the end, what we're seeing here is that these streaming services, you have to have multiple streaming services if you want to watch all the shows that everyone's talking about. And yes, everyone's talking about Bridgerton right now. No, I have not watched it. Yes, I've heard what all the fuss is about, because it's basically kind of like the shows that used to be on like Cinemax in the Middle of the Night or HBO in the middle of the night, if
you catch my drift. So all these people are talking about how great Bridgerton is, but yeah, we know why you're watching it. It is a little skin involved in that show apparently. Yeah, so anyway, if you want to watch all these shows, you got to have all these various services. And Sling TV is a cable service. I get it. It's not like a Netflix, it's not like
a Disney Plus. But we've seen them raise prices as well, and SlingTV, just like the rest of them, is raising prices right now five dollars a month for new customers. So now the minimum plan is thirty five a month through them, and new customers are sorry. Existing customers will have their prices jump in July. So thank you Sling for the little runway there of six months for existing customers.
But here's the funny part about this is that when Sling sent me this email, they kind of headlined it with how they're expanding free DVR storage to fifty hours versus I think it was ten before for users, and so that was the headline and I was like, oh, that's cool, but is that really that Oh and then you read a little further and oh, there's the news of the five dollars there. It is buried in the email. Now,
they did do something nice. They did expand, like I said, the free DVR storage to fifty hours, which is nice and that's actually quite useful. But the DVR Plus now if you pay extra five dollars a month for that, it's now two hundred hours of storage instead of fifty. So again Sling is saying, look, our hands are tied here. We had to raise our prices because the cable or the I guess they are cable TV channels are raising their programming fees to us. And this is something we've
seen over and over. It's what the cable companies all all complained about. Is said, it's not us, We're not raising your rates. It's just that all these providers keep charging us more, so we have to pass that along to you. And I'm sure some of that's true and some of it's not. But at the end of the day, what we've seen over and over is that. It doesn't matter.
It's the same old thing.
If you're getting programming, the prices are going to go up, whether they go up every year or every other year or every year and a half, they go up on a regular schedule. We've seen it with Netflix, We've seen it with Disney Plus, We've seen it with everything except I don't even want to say this out loud, but the music services. The music services have not raised their prices since they started. If you think about it, Spotify Premium started at nine to ninety nine a month and
it's continued at nine to ninety nine a month. The only cheaper music service out there is Amazon Music, which you can get for seven ninety nine a month. Why am I not subscribed to that for cheaper? I'm paying so much. I'm paying for Apple Music, I'm paying for Google Music, and I'm not paying for Spotify. But I'm paying for two music services and what's the other one, SiriusXM. So I'm paying like thirty thirty five dollars a month for music? Gosh, why am I doing that? I should
just go with Amazon and just be done. But I haven't even used their music service. I'm guessing it's the same for eight bucks a month. Why am I not doing that?
I should?
All right, let's get to another question. Joseph Fina says, Hi, Rick, thank you for your services. You've been a blessing for me and I have learned a lot from you. My question is this My phone carrier is T Mobile. We've been paying for insurance protection on a plan of three of my family members for a while. Now we all have iPhones. My question is do you know of any secure, free app that we could use? T Mobile charges are high?
We pay eighteen dollars a month per phone. Whoo. I think by now we've already paid the cost of the phone twice just by paying insurance. Thank you, say hi to your beautiful family, Sent from my iPhone Josephina. Josephina, you are correct in your assessment that, yes, you have already paid for a new phone in the insurance that you've been paying for.
So diligently every month.
So what's my recommendation, Well, I have two number one and this is the ideal recommendation. If you have any savings whatsoever, dump the insurance because if you do the math on insurance, yes you're insuring an eight hundred nine hundred dollars phone. But do the math if you actually have a problem with this phone other than a screen, you know, a screen crack, which they're going to charge you know, twenty nine bucks for whatever, or maybe even
do it for free. You know, if you look at these other things that they're doing, there's a pretty deductible of probably one hundred, one hundred and twenty nine to you know, two hundred dollars depending on what needs to be done. And so if you add that up with the monthly fee, so twenty dollars a month times twelve months, is two hundred and forty dollars a year. Now, if you have one problem with that phone, let's say you spend another one hundred dollars. Now you're up to three
hundred and forty dollars. So if you don't have a problem, all that rolls into the next year, and now you're up to you know, four hundred dollars for the insurance. So again, if you have any any savings whatsoever, think about maybe imagining that a portion of that savings is to protect your phone investment. And I say investment, it's not really an investment because the price drops so it's not an investment, it's a what's the thing that the car is. It's like, when you drive it off the lot,
it just goes down in price. It's a it's not an investment at all. It's a it's a diminishing returns product. Right as soon as you drive it off, it's it's lost some of its value. Same thing with your phone. So again, when we look at this, this phone charge for eighteen dollars a month times a family of three, that is a lot, that's sixty dollars a month. Practically, I think you're better served doing two things. Number one, start a little fund that is just for your iPhone insurance.
Put in one hundred bucks and just start with that. Then take a portion of your eighteen dollars a month, which let's say you're paying. You know you said almost sixty. Let's just say you put in twenty five dollars a month. Automatically. Just put in twenty five dollars a month. At the end of a year, you will have twenty five dollars times twelve, you'll have three hundred plus your original one hundred dollars. That's four hundred dollars that should cover a
repair should you need it. And I'm talking a repair outright. You just go to you break, I fix whatever, I crack, you break whatever, all those things. You go into one of those stores and they say, oh, your screens crack, We're gonna have to charge you two ninety nine. You go, oh cool, I've got four hundred in this little account. Here you go cash. Now does it feel as good as paying thirty bucks because you have insurance?
No? But the reality is when you really do the math.
The thing about insurance is you're gonna end up paying for it, and it's gonna cost you a lot. And this a phone that you can if you save up this money eventually eclipse the cost of the insurance that you're putting in every month, and it turns out to be a much better deal. Now, if you don't want to do that, the thing that I would recommend is a company called Square Trade. They are now owned by all State, and their iPhone plan is four phones for
twenty dollars a month. Four phones twenty dollars a month, covers accidents, protects a new phone, protects an old phone, and that's it. It just there is a deductible and the deductibles are kind of high, but it's one hundred and forty nine dollars deductible. So but again this is what I'm talking about. If you know so one forty nine plus that twenty a month, one month in if you have a problem, you're already looking at fifty one,
sixty one and seventy dollars to fix your phone. So I think it's better just to save the money and self insure, as I would call it. But on the flip side, the only thing about the Square trade that I remembered when I did a story with them many years ago, and maybe they changed this is that you have to have your phone so they they will not replace a lost phone or a stolen phone. It has
to be a damaged phone. So even if you had to bring your phone to them in a little plastic baggie all messed up, they will take it, and they will they will give you a new one, a refurbished one, but they can't do a lost or stolen phone. And that's how they keep their price so much cheaper than what you're paying, because I think in your plan they may give you a new phone if you lost it, but you have to check the terms of your plan. But great question. And it was funny. I was in
Apple buying a phone. This was a couple of years ago, and I think I told this story, but you know they they were like, do you want Apple Care? And it was like ninety nine and I said, no way, no, I'm not doing Apple Care. I'll just self ensure. And then I proceeded to buy a case for fifty dollars half the price of the Apple Care for.
The two or three years whatever, maybe a year.
Amazon's Alexa device is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. And I got to say, I used to really pooh pooh the Alexa, and I think that they have really come a long way. And I think Alexa and what app Amazon is doing with Alexa is pretty good. I still think that Google responds to commands just a little bit better and a little bit smarter. But I think that Alexa has gotten really really good, and the amount of things that you can do with Alexa has just gotten so good.
And the ecosystem of products.
That work with Alexa and where it is and how you can access it has just gotten really really good.
But some new features.
Number one, Alexa has always done this thing where it's called hunches, where it would light up. Don't use Alexa a lot, so I'm not particularly sure about this, but if it thought about something proactively, it would light up and then you say, oh, what's going on a and it would say to you like, I think you left this light on. Do you want me to turn it off? And you go sure, Now it's gonna do that by itself.
So I think this is brilliant. And you know, let's say you leave your house for the weekend, you forget to turn off your lights, or maybe you leave your music playing or something. You know, Alexa kind of knows your patterns and it says, huh, that's not like Rich to leave his lights on for twenty hours. I'm gonna go ahead and just turn that light off. And it does and it won't ask you permission to do it, which I think is really cool. And I'm sure you can turn this off. Don't don't scream at me.
And say, Rich, how dare we let these things do their own thing? They're just gonna at some point kill us. No, we'll be okay. I think we'll be okay.
Now this is even cooler. This is Alexa's new feature called guard plus. This is five dollars a month. But it kind of turns any echo speaker into a security system. And what it does is it links up with ADT and when it listens for sounds and it hears something that seems like it could be part of a break in or yeah, basically burglary, break in, smoke fire, it will alert you. And it will it will listen for
these sounds. It will listen for the sound of a smoke detector, it will listen for the sound of glass breaking, it will listen for the sound of when you're not home, someone talking in your house or outside your home. If it can listen that far, and it will call you. Well,
it will alert you on your phone. And then once it alerts you, you can say you can listen in on your device, which is just brilliant, and then you can decide if you want to call the authorities, and with one more click you can get you know, you can reach one of these Alexa I guess it's like a you know, like one of those call centers for your for your alarm companies. It's like that, but it's you know, now handling these Alexa requests. And I probably said a way too many times. I probably set off
all your smart devices. I apologize, but this is five dollars a month. I think it sounds really cool. The other thing that it can do is it can make the sound of a dog barking. So if you are not home and this thing here's someone outside your house, you're a speaker, can just start sounding like a dog. And I have not tested this, so I don't know how good it sounds. But I mean, this is just this stuff is fascinating to me.
It really is.
I mean, it's just getting so smart, and I mean, why would you not want that, you know, I mean it just sounds it sounds like something that you would want.
Let's get to the next question. Let's see here.
Eric says, is there a good, totally free or very low cost VPN for an older Mac desktop? Thank you, Eric, Well, I am not fully up to speed on VPNs, and I know that the Holy Grail is is a free VPN, and I'm sure if you search for free VPN there are probably many, many of them that show up. But I would be a little concerned about a free VPN because VPNs cost money to operate and especially to keep them private and secure. So I probably would not want a free VPN. Now, with that said, there are some
free VPNs out there. I know that if you have Google Drive, if you pay for storage on a certain tier, they do have a free VPN available for your Android device. And if you let me see where that page is, if you look at VPN by Google one. So if you just go just Google Google VPN, sorry, Google Google one VPN, and it's included in your price of Google one membership. And oh, oh wow, Google just chimed in. I did not say, h hg but okay, but you can turn this on.
Oh look at this.
Okay, so this is actually this is actually pretty cool. I did not realize this. But the VPN is included on Google one membership with two terabytes in higher, which is what I pay for. That's ten dollars a month right now. The VPN is for Android phones, but it says it is coming soon to iOS, Windows and mac so that is a very good added benefit. Now you may want to debate me on do you trust Google with your VPN information.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm assuming that Google has documented exactly what they keep. It says here some minimum logging is performed to ensure quality of service, but your network traffic is never logged and your IP is not associated to your activity. I mean, that's kind of cool. Maybe I'm gonna start installing this on my Android phones. That's really neat.
Okay.
The other thing that you can do is if you want something that's totally free. Opera, the Opera web browser has a built in VPN that's free, and there's probably some limitations on just how much you can use it for free, but that's another freeway of doing it. So that's what I'd recommend Eric, if you want some free options. If you want to pay a little bit, I'm not really an expert in the best VPNs out there, but I do hear Nord VPN over and over and over.
They've got apps for everything from Android to Linux and Firefox and iOS. So if you want to pay a little bit, Nord VPN is pretty good.
And it's if.
You pay for a two year plan, it's three dollars and seventy one cents a month. Yeah, so it's eighty nine dollars for the first two years. If you just do it month by month, it's very expensive. It's twelve dollars a month. I'm sure that there are some deals out there, like some promo codes and stuff for NordVPN, but that's what i'd recommend. If you are a Google one subscriber, I would check into that first.
Great question.
Oh, speaking of Amazon, you know they own Ring. I'm just gonna spend a short amount of time on this, but they came out with a new small and cheap video doorbell from Ring. It's called the Ring Video Doorbell Wired. It's their cheapest and smallest doorbell yet at just sixty dollars, you get ten ADP HD video, night vision, live view, two way talk with noise cancelation, and basically everything you need the main thing, and I would definitely definitely recommend this.
If you have a doorbell on the front of your home, go with this wired Ring video doorbell versus the battery one because you'll never have to change a battery and that is a win in my book. All I know is I'm constantly charging the battery for my Ring outside
and I wish it was wired. But I did not have a wired doorbell on my house when I moved here, and I talked to an electrician or several of them to get that you know, that little low voltage installed, and it's kind of a pain if it's not already there. It's kind of a pain because they base have to use a transformer at the top and then run that wire down. I'm sure it's not that big of a deal, but they made it seem like it was kind of
a pain. And so I just said, you know, I'll just go with the battery, but I would love, you know, I might revisit this actually, And and because I think I'm gonna switch over everything to ring at this point, because I really like what they're doing. And I just I'm sick of my doorbell going dead, right, It's like, why is my doorbell dead?
Oh, I gotta charge it again. I've had people standing outside.
Friends, not recently, but you know in the past, in the in the before days, when friends would come over and they just stand out there because they rang the doorbell and it didn't work, and they and finally you hear this little knock, like and they'd be like, I'm like someone at the door, and sure enough they'd been standing out there because the doorbell didn't work. So yeah,
I gotta I gotta get on that. I do try to I've gotten alerts before from ring to like charge my doorbell, but I didn't see one recently, and my mother in law came by and she said, your doorbell was not working.
Rich, Well, maybe that was a reason.
Just kidding, just kidding, all right. Uh. Marvin says, I've noticed on many occasions that Google has responded to a stream of words used in a conversation as if I had pressed the Google Assistant button on my phone? Is there a means to turning this standby mode off? Thanks sent for my iPad, Marvin. You know it just happened on this podcast. It often happens when you say the word Google and you didn't actually say the h Google. And I asked Google how they get around this. I
actually asked some of my contacts at Google. I said, you're you're around these things all day, like what do you say? And they use the term hey G. So if they don't want it to activate, so hey G, hey G, and it won't activate. So I try to remember that on my show, but generally I mess it up. But if you so on the iPhone, there's a simple, simple way to do this, And on the iPhone, all you have to do if you don't want Siria to listen.
Is just flip your phone over on its face and if you lay your phone face down on the table and you say H Siri, she will not spring into action. It's amazing, it's simple, it's easy. It's something that you probably have never done, but it works. Maybe you've inadvertently done that with the Google stuff. It's not that easy now. On the speakers, generally they have a little slider that you can do or I think I don't know if you can say, uh, don't listen. I'm not gonna try
it right now. But anyway, if you're on your phone, if you have a speaker, generally look for a switch in the back. That's the short answer to that question. But if you are on the phone on Android, just go into your Android into Assistant settings and then under all settings, tap General and then you can turn Google Assistant on or off. There used to be a way that you can have H Google turn a Wait a second, did they did they turn off the ability to have H Google or Hey G. It used to be you
could turn off. Well, maybe you can only turn it off when the screen was off.
I don't know.
Anyway, it seems like anyway, you can go into settings and turn it off completely. If you don't use it, it's fine. Personally, I would recommend.
Against turning it off. And here's why.
If you ever found yourself and I know this is weird dark places, but if you ever found yourself in an emergency situation and your last chance at life was to call Google for help, right, And I'm just saying this is I don't even know if you could or if it would work or whatever, but let's just say you were in some sort of situation where you couldn't do anything except use your voice and your phone was nearby.
How frustrated and sad would you be if you didn't make it because you turned off the hey g functionality on your phone. You'd be really mad, right, You'd be looking down from heaven at yourself, being like, why'd you turn that off?
It could have saved you. And so I know it's a.
Very small case scenario and it's weird, but you know this is.
I have to think of all things.
And so that's why personally, I would rather deal with the the misfirings and the the false activations of hey G versus turn it off completely on my phone but that's just me.
I mean, I'm just one person. I'm just giving you my opinion.
You're tuned into the rich on Tech show, so I'm giving you what rich on Tech thinks, which is me. You may think differently, but that's what I think. And so that's you know, that's it's one of those things. It's you know, do as you please. But I'm just giving you all of the information, all of the information at hand, so that you can make the best possible decision with it. All right, should we take a question
from the voicemail? I usually get some voicemails on the website at let's see it's rich on tech dot TV slash podcast And if you look in the lower right hand corner, you can actually leave a voicemail for me. And this one has no name, but let's just hear what it's all about.
Hey, rich Chip from Long Beach. A couple weeks ago, Australian guy was asking you to have your podcast on a little bit longer hour and a half and you're explaining how hard that would be. But my question is when is KTLA gonna start giving you more time for your news segments? You only get about two and a half minutes. You need more. The weather is like six segments within the hour, So we want more time with you on your KTLA news segment.
Oh that's funny. Wow, Chip, you are near and dear to my heart. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I do appreciate you asking that. But you have to understand. You have to understand, you know, you have to understand local news. You have to understand the news business and my segment. So my segment is, for all intents purposes, a feature segment on technology. Now do I think it's the most important segment in the show.
Of course I do.
I think that everything that I talk about and everything I put in my segment is is super super important and it's highly you know, I craft my segments around what I think people should know when it comes to consumer technology, and so yes, what I like more time?
Of course, would.
Katy La like to give me more time? I think, I mean, they don't, but you know, what can I say? The other thing is it's also the timing of the show. There are days when they say, Rich, you've got more time. But in general, you're right, you must have taken a stopwatch to my segment. But in general, yeah, It's about two minutes and thirty seconds, and I'm thankful every time it's on, honestly because I've been there for ten years and I've you know, I really feel like what I'm
doing is very important to be honest the way. Yes, what I love to sit there and chat with the anchors for ten minutes about all this stuff. Yes, but it's also tricky because it gets a little nerdy, and you know, it's it is a newscast where they have a lot of pressing day of air stuff to get to as well. But with all that said, I feel like, and this is what keeps me kind of going in the scheme of things. I feel like I'm a three hundred and sixty degree product, not just the KTLA News.
So yes, of course, the KTLA news segment is my bread and butter. But I've got the podcast, I've got Instagram, I've got Facebook, I've got Twitter, I've got Facebook Live, I've got Instagram Live. So all these little things where people can reach me and also not just see the one angle to my story that I put on KTLA, but also you know, you can maybe comment on my Instagram with a question about it, or maybe I explain it a little bit more in depth on my Facebook page,
or maybe I do a video on it. So again, that's the way I see it, and so to me, yes, that's what I love.
More time on the show, of course, and do I ask for it, of course.
But at the same time, I think that between everything that I do, I really.
Try to feel like if you.
You know, I feel like the KTLA segment is a little taste and you're like, oh, that's interesting. Let me go to the website and see what are the resources Rich has on that. And that's the way that I see it. So good question. Thank you Chip for looking out for me. I feel like I should hire you as my agent.
All Right.
I got a couple of new features for Apple stuff this week, so I'm just gonna go through them kind of quick. Number one, if you have an Apple Watch, there's a new feature called Time to Walk And they don't call it a podcast, but for all intents and purposes, this is a podcast on your Apple Watch that you
can listen to while you walk. And the first four were a bunch of celebrities that you know, like Shawn Mendes is on there, Draymond Green basketball, you know, very very famous basketball player and these these are stories that are so it's a story from the person twenty five to forty minutes that you're meant to like kind of walk. They're walking while they tell the story, and you're walking, and so you're just walking with them basically, and there's
no host or anything. It's just them kind of talking to you in your ear. And you know, Apple says that walking is one of the easiest forms of exercise.
This will get people to walk more.
Now, I think it's kind of tough because it's basically a podcast, and I think people are listening to a lot of podcasts. But hey, if it's going to get people to walk more and your favorite celebrity is on there, why not. You know, I'm sure you can find a million interviews with these people that they have on regular podcasts. But hey, you know whatever, So you have to have an Apple Watch. It's part of Apple Fitness Plus. I should probably mention that, so you do need a subscription.
You know that the Fitness Plus subscription to access these But if you want to see what they're all about, all you have to do is make sure your phone is updated and your Apple Watch is updated and you open up that fitness app on your watch and it should just open up and you should see the the I don't know what they call it, like a tie right at the top with one of these one of these walks time to walk on that tile and you
can download them. I think they auto download your watch or you can download them so you can do it all offline.
But again, I mean, it's cool.
And the main difference between this and a podcast is twofold number one. It's a story and then it's like, I think three songs that the influencer or celebrity or whoever inspiring person that they're interviewing, whoever they pick, I think three songs that move them. And then those three songs are at the end of the walk. And then during the walk, while they're telling their story, there are
little pictures that are synced to the story. So for example, Dolly Parton was talking about this statue that's in her I guess the city she grew up in, and you know it's in like the middle of the square and you you know, goes ding ning And while you're listening to this, it will show you the little picture of.
The statue on your watch.
So that's kind of unique, and that's yes, that sets it apart from your standard podcast. Uh. The other thing is that if you have a home pod, and all of these features really refer to very new Apple stuff. If you have a HomePod Mini and an iPhone eleven or twelve, there is an update for the HomePod Mini that makes hand off just a little bit slicker, a little bit cooler, and a little bit easier. So the iPhone eleven, the iPhone twelve, and the home Pod Mini
have this special chip in it. I think it's called the you. I think it's called the U one chip or the UW chip, U one chip, let me see if it's the U one Yeah, U one chip, And the U one chip has ultra wideband technology, which is just fancy term for things that can tell proximity to each other. And so now your phone and your speaker know when they're close to each other and they can kind of just exchange information faster and easier because it
knows that you're nearby. And so it's got this new revamped screen that you know, makes listening to stuff easier and also starting and stopping music on your HomePod easier, and setting alarms on your HomePod easier. If there's nothing playing on your HomePod and you bring your phone nearby, it will give you some suggested things to play, kind
of like if you've seen that happen with AirPods. If you put them in your ear and you look at the lock screen on your phone, it suggests a whole bunch of things that you can just tap once and start playing, whether it's podcasts or music.
So it does that, and.
Then finally you can view the media controls without unlocking your iPhone and anyone in your home I tried to nail Apple down on an answer on this. They don't really give me a straight answer, but it sounds like anyone with an iPhone near your device can can bring up those music controls from the HomePod and press play stop or perhaps change the music on there. But I'm not really sure. Yes, see and control what's playing. Oh see and control what's playing. Okay, so you can't change
the music, but you can control it. So that means like, you know, play pause, whatever. Now, if you want to get these things, your HomePod should automatically update, and if you want to manually check for the updates, just go into the home app on your iPhone, select home settings and then software update and that should find it.
I did it. It's different. It's not like a huge difference.
But it's definitely a little bit different and a little bit better than before. The haptics are really improved. They are very different. When you get your stuff nearby your phone, near to the HomePod Mini, I should say this doesn't apply to the regular home pod. Oh my gosh, listen to the sound of that music.
You know what that means. It is the end of the show.
If you would like to submit a question for me to answer, there are two ways to do just that. You can go to richon Tech dot tv slash podcast and hit the microphone button to leave a voicemail, or you can go to my Facebook page Facebook dot com slash rich on tech and hit the big blue send email button.
It should still be there.
I know Facebook just redesigned everything, but it should still be there. If not, just hello at Richontech dot tv also works. Also. I would love it if you would rate and review this podcast to help other people discover it. You can go to rate this podcast dot com slash rich on Tech to do that. You can find me online at rich on Tech if you are not already following me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all the likely places you can find me there. My name is rich Dimiro.
Thank you so much for listening. I do appreciate the little community that we have here of listeners to this show. I say little, I mean I think it's big, but you know what I mean, I meant tight knit community, because I really do. It's amazing how many people reference the podcast when they email me or you get in touch with me, so I love it. Keep it coming, stay safe, I will talk to you real soon