Listener Mail 2014 Extravaganza

context of a single episode. So we're actually gonna do a couple of these where I'm going to answer some of these questions. And if you guys ever have questions for me that you would like me to answer, whether it's going to be a full episode or just a quick question that you're curious about, send me those questions. That address that you can send them to is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, and I will of course repeat that at the end. So let's get started. Now.

A lot of the questions we have here actually come to me through Facebook. The Facebook tech Stuff page is a great community. If you haven't already checked it out, you should go take a look. And so I'm going to respond to some of these. So first is from Simon on Facebook, and Simon wrote smart watches views and opinions? Are they truly a fulfillment of a niche in the market, or, as I have both heard and suspect, are they a

product that is looking for a solution? I for one, will never own one, as my day to day life work especially, will never allow something as delicate and expensive as that to be on my wrist. Nobody I know once one either. Well, my answer to you is that smart watches certainly do have an audience out there. I think that the the concept of them being a solution that's looking for a problem is probably fairly accurate. But I felt the same way about tablets, So it's not

necessarily a problem solution issue. It may just be one of those things that's an implementation that appeals to people. Now, I say that as someone who owns a smart watch. I own the Pebble smart watch, which, as smart watches go, is is, you know, fairly modest. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some of the more recent smart watches, but it does have notifications on it. I can control music playing on my smartphone through my watch. I can accept or deny I call using my watch.

It will alert me to anything coming through has a little vibrating motor, so I can feel it on my wrist, which is great. I've reached that point in my life where I no longer notice if my phone is vibrating in my my pocket, and when I don't have my phone in my pocket, I experienced phantom vibrations against my legs. So having a watch where I actually had feel it

against my wrist is very helpful. What's more, I don't currently own more than one smart watch, but I have two that are on the way to me, assuming that the projects ever get to the point where they can actually shop. There were a couple of different crowdfunded projects I backed that will eventually result in me getting a new smart watch, assuming that they they are ultimately successful. I have it. I have a lot of faith in them.

But the two that I have waiting for me are the Craos Meteor, which is a voice and gest your control smart watch, and the Agent smart watch. Now, the common thread between all of these is that they will work with different operating systems. They pair with a smartphone, but you don't have to have a specific type of smartphone to pair with them. UH and that really appeals

to me. I like the idea of having these kinds of technologies that will work with lots of different options, so that way I'm not nailed down to a single one that's gonna come into play a little bit later. And by a little bit later, I mean right now. Because on Twitter a user who I just have the user name and the handle, which is g t r f r K eight seven eight seven, who asked what

were my thoughts on the Apple Watch. So I'm recording this the same week that Apple had its big announcement of the new iPhones and the Apple Watch, so the date of this recording is actually the eleventh of September two. Now, I think that some of the elements of the Apple Watch are really really cool. That user interface that they have where you use the dial to navigate through it, that looks like it's very smooth. It's a smart way

of going about it. I mean, you don't want to really have a touch screen interface as your primary way of interacting with a smart watch because it's just it's too small of a screen. Just by putting your finger on the screen, you're obscuring so much of it that it's really hard to use no very simple controls like a play or a pause. That's okay, but if you're trying to select between apps, it's a little more problematic.

I think they really nailed it. However, the physical design of the watch, the actual way the watch looks, doesn't do a whole lot for me. I don't find it really appealing. I love the idea that has swapp dorble bands, so you can change those out depending upon what sort of look you're going for. I think that's great. I love that idea of customization. I'm not a fashionable guy. Anyone who knows me will tell you as much. But the idea of being able to use the same watch

in different contexts by swapping out the bands is appealing. Also. I think there's some other cool things like the Apple pay system, which is that wireless payment method. It works with the Apple Watch as well. You can use the watch to help pay for things, and the way that they've implemented security is interesting. You have to enter a pin in order to make the first payment, so you've got your watch on you enter the pin that authorized

the watch it to make the payment. But from that point forward, the watch will continue to allow you to make payments until contact is broken between the watch and your skin. So if you take the watch off, it will no longer be able to pay for things, which makes it much more secure as long as someone doesn't chop off your arm. So word to the wise. Um other things that I think are cool. The health tracking technology is pretty neat. It's not the only smart watch

to do that, but it's always cool to see that. Uh, the fact that it's required to do you have to have either an iPhone five or later to pair with it. That's the part I ball cat And it's because it you have to be in the iOS system in order for this watch to work. And if you're already invested in that system, that's great. There's no necessarily, that's not necessarily a problem. You can just jump on and grab

one if you've got the money to do it. But if you are not in that Apple ecosystem, then suddenly this watch gets really super expensive instead of just expensive. The watch is about three dollars. Now, as far as watches go, that's really not that crazy expensive. You have regular non smart watches that are fashioned watches that will be three or four times that amount of money. I don't own any of those because I don't spend that kind of crazy money on accessories, but is not outside

the realm of expectation for a really nice watch. However, if you are not inside that Apple ecosystem already, you also have to go out and buy an iPhone, So that's at minimum around two hundred bucks plus the monthly iPhone bill, so that starts to get to be a really expensive watch. Again, if you're already invested in the Apple space, then you can kind of separate the smart watch from the purchase of the iPhone because you already have one same sort of thing with other smart watches.

If you already have a smart phone, then a smart watch can sort of look at like its own individual purchase. But if you're not in that ecosystem, you have to take all of those costs into account, and that's where it gets really expensive. And that's one of the reasons why I don't like being locked down into it. So those are my thoughts on that. Moving on, Catherine, who works in our office, actually asked me what I thought of the iPhone six, so she has to listen to

this episode to find out. I wouldn't tell her in the office. I think it's a strong device. It looks like it's a nice evolution of the the form. It doesn't look like it's spectacularly different. You know. The larger screen space is nice. If you really want to go super crazy with the iPhone six plus, you can, and you need that extra space. That looks to me like it's a little larger than what I would be comfortable carrying. But the iPhone six in general looks really nice. It's

it's thinner than previous generations, which is nice. Uh, and it has that camera. I love the iPhone cameras. I don't own one. My wife phone's an iPhone and the picture she takes are gorgeous, and it's for two main reasons. One, the technology and software in the iPhone are fantastic as far as the picture taking quality goes. And to she's a good photographer. Um My pictures never look as good for the reverse of those same two reasons. So if you get the iPhone six plus, I think the optical

image stabilizer is awesome. I love that. It's not the only smartphone in the world to have one of those, by the way, but an optical image stabilizer is different from a digital image stabilizer. It actually can physically move within the framework of the phone itself and help cancel out jitter and movements so that you get clearer pictures.

So that's a nice addition. I think it's if someone's looking to move from an earlier generation of iPhone to the six, uh, I think there's enough reasons to do it, assuming that you are not having to pay like some crazy cancelation fee that then I might say, you know, wait until the next one. That's the nice thing about these iPhone generations is that if you skip a generation for the most part, after the four or so, it's

not that big a deal. Um, It's it's you know, it was the earlier iPhones where the different generations were uh larger gaps were between those generations, like the technologically speaking, that's when you really wanted to upgrade year over year. If you had the money these days, I would say wait.

And you know, if so, if you had an iPhone five and it's gonna be another year before your contract is up, I don't think there's anything specific that would require you to move to the iPhone six unless you wanted the Apple pay uh wireless payment stuff. And I'll talk about that. In a second, we have someone who asked us about that. So moving on to the next one. Ryan on Twitter said, the iPhone goes big. Is that a bold move or is it too late to the party.

So here's the interesting thing I think about this strategy. You see some companies come out with a line of products where they're trying to hit all the possible iterations of that product at once. So you'll see tablets come mount in multiple sizes. That way, the consumer can decide which size fits best in his or her lifestyle and they'll go after that. One. Apple goes about this the opposite way. Apple will come out with a single size, tell you this is what you want, and then consumers

go after it. And then after they've gotten that that consumer base, over the years, they've started to introduce different form factors. So that's where you get things like the iPad many and now they can attract new people to buy the iPad as well as folks who already own an iPad going out and buying the new form factor.

And it works really well for Apple. So they're taking kind of the opposite approach of the other companies that let everything become available at once and it's worked for Apple, so I think, Uh, I don't think they're too late to the party. I think that this is just in line with Apple strategy. Whether or not the iPhone six will plus the iPhone six plus will ever be considered a great phone, I don't know. It's like I said,

it's a little large for me. I don't think it would be a very comfortable fit for for me on a day to day basis. However, I do like a lot of the features in it, so it'll like I think, it will depend upon the user experience for the individual person. Next we have Michael from Facebook who said, uh, do I know why Apple would stay with an eight megapixel camera on the iPhone six? So why why would Apple

do that? Why wouldn't they upgrade? Uh? And the answer I have is that the images that the iPhone takes tend to be really good already, and megapixels don't matter as much as you might think they do. Megapixels are important if you are going to be blowing an image up to a much greater size than what you would typically have on your phone or maybe even a desktop computer.

So if you plan on displaying an image on a big screen, television, or you're going to be printing out a poster sized image of something, you want to have a camera that packs in a to megapixels because then your resolution is going to be higher and you won't have these artifacts that you would see in a lower

resolution photograph show up in that representation. But if you're not doing that, if you're sharing images mostly on phones or on social networks, things that are not going to be typically larger than your average computer monitor screen, you really don't need to upgrade those megapixels that much. That's not really that important. Uh, it doesn't help the quality

of the image. It just helps the resolution. So other things that are really important, our color representation and brightness and contrasts, those kind of things which have nothing to do with the number of megapixels involved. It has everything

to do with the sensors in the camera itself. So I think they're fine unless we get into a world where everyone wants to view their images on their eight inch television at home, and if you have one of those, invite me over, then I don't think it's gonna be

a big deal. So I think that's why they didn't bother with upgrading it, because it's not really you know, I guess you could upgraded it just so that you would have the the ad copy to say now it has a twelve megapixel or sixteen megapixel camera in it, but it's just not necessary. We've got more listener mail coming up in just a second, but let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor, Audible dot com. I

love this service. Audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook of your choice than a free thirty day trial membership. Just go to audible podcast dot com slash tech stuff and you can choose from more than one hundred fifty thousand titles from a broad range of genres. Just download a title free and start listening. Is that easy. Go to audible podcast dot com slash tech Stuff. That's audible podcast dot com slash tech stuff and get started today.

And if you're looking for a recommendation, I can't think of anyone better than Neil Game and one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite readers. His voice is mesmerizing, really pulls you into the story, and I really recommend his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It's a phenomenal book, really spell binding, so go check that out. Audible podcast dot Com Slash tech Stuff. Next from Reuben on Facebook and full Disclosure. I know

Reuben personally, He's a great guy, he says. Seeing as the new iPhone is the talk of the town, I'd love to hear about Apple Pay and security concerns. With the recent celebrity nude hackings via Apple accounts, do we want to keep all of our financials there too? This is a great question how secure is this payment process? So first we have to understand exactly what's going on with this Apple uh system, and it's a little tricky

because we don't know all the details. What Apple has said is that they are not storing credit card information on their servers. So this means that if hackers target Apple servers and try to steal information, they're not going to get user credit cards as part of that. Also, when you make a purchase with Apple Pay, it's doing so with a one time security code that's dynamically generated based upon your actual credit card number. That one time

security code is what is transferred to the vendor. This means that the vendor, the person that you're buying stuff from, never gets your credit card number. They just get that security code, and then that represents the sale the you're you are transferring funds to this vendor for whatever it

is you're buying. So that the nice thing about that is if some target, some hacker targets a a system like a home depot or or target, both of which have been hit by hackers recently and had credit card information stolen, um, then you don't have to worry about your credit card getting compromised. All they're going to get is a security code that has no other connection to

your credit card that they are able to see. Now, the question remains, how are these payments actually processed, because ultimately something has to link that security code that is generated by your phone to your credit card, otherwise no one would know who to charge when you were purchasing something. Uh. Now, Apple has said that all the information stored on a chip encrypted on a chip in the phone itself, so

again it's not going to Apple servers. So what I suspect is happening is that the credit card company in question, for example, Visa, has the formula to generate the one time codes based on the credit card number and can reverse that process so that it under it knows who

bought what when? So when the vendor has processed the payment for whatever it is that you wanted to buy, that security code is then processed by Visa, which can run it backwards through the encryption process that created the security code in the first place to find out who it was that made that purchase and and charge the appropriate card. That's the guess, because Apple has not, to my knowledge, actually said this is the way this is

working in the background. But if that's true, then the only real target for hackers to aim at our credit card companies, which are pretty good at fending off attacks. And ultimately, you know that's you have to have your trust go somewhere so it If this is true, then you don't have to worry about people targeting Apple and getting your credit card information. Other stuff that stored on Apple servers may still be vulnerable, but your credit card

information will not be among it. So great, correct question, Ruben, Thanks so much. Now we are done with the Apple stuff. If all of you are sick of Apple, don't worry the rest of the episode. No more Apple, I think if I might mention it in passing, but there are no more questions as far as I know, So next is from Cody on Facebook who said is the government

keeping us from getting jet packs? Which I assume was a facetious question, but I'm going to answer it seriously because I think when we all talk about the future, the question where's my jet pack? Is never far from our minds. So two things are really keeping us from getting working jet packs, And one is the technology building a jet pack that works efficiently and safely, so in other words, you won't have to refuel it every couple

of minutes and it won't set you on fire. These are two big important things that any good jet pack needs to be able to do. The other would be government regulation. So assuming that we get to a point where a consumer jet pack is in fact a possibility, that some company has created one and is selling them to people, I'm sure we would see the government get

involved and start to put regulations on here. You would probably be required to have some sort of pilot's license, assuming they would even allow such a product to be legal in the US in the first place. Uh. The reason for this is because you're essentially turning human beings into projectiles, and for the safety of both the person using the jet pack and everybody and everything around them, there would have to be regulation. I can't imagine a world where such a thing hits the market and the

government doesn't immediately react. Uh, the f a A alone would get involved. So I don't think the government is currently keeping us from getting jet packs, but it might in the future, assuming that the technology ever evolves to the point where it could be a practicality. So good question. Next from Himanshu on Facebook. When we have watches from Citizen the Eco drive with extremely long battery life, why

can't the same be replicated in mobiles? Instead of competing like juveniles on trivial features like screen size thickness, why can't mobile firms come up with battery enhancement solution or maybe even replacement was say solar panels or piece of electric sensors, ETCETERA great question. So, battery technology has been a real problem of thorn in the side of engineers for years. It's one of those things that is a

source of frustration. It illustrates that Moore's law is very effective at predicting how powerful a computer processor will be over time, that every two years you'll essentially double the power of the computer processor. But there's no correlative for batteries and the reasons that batteries rely on physical properties as in the actual laws of physics and chemistry, batteries produce electricity through chemical reactions, so we're limited by the

physics of those chemical reactions. You know, you're not gonna get more electrons from this same chemical reaction than you did two years ago. Uh. You can tweak little things like the actual chemicals involved, but that's a difficult thing as well. You have to figure out all sorts of factors like how much do the chemicals cost, how dense are they, how heavy are they? Uh? Are they safe? Could it be a hazard if the chemicals if the

battery were breached. All of these things play apart in considerations, and ultimately you're just going to see incremental improvement. You're not going to see a huge leap. Now there aren't people working on some incredible technologies that could potentially boost battery efficiency quite a bit, but these are all sort of long shots at the moment. We don't know if they're going to pan out into a kind of technology that will become affordable enough to be part of consumer tech.

As far as relying on something like solar panels or piece of electric elements. It's not really realistic for most types of electronics because they don't produce enough electricity to run or recharge those electronics in a reasonable amount of time. The surface area alone for solar panels that you would need to run something like a smartphone. I'm not talking about charging it, I mean actually running it full blast,

like you're scrolling around and checking out the internet. Uh, you would need so many solar panels that would just make the technology unwieldy. And also you would be reliant upon having a good, uh good access to sunlight, which not all of us have. So the it's it's a real issue, you know, power is a real issue for

electronics in the future. And that's why you see a lot of these improvements going towards the efficiency of the electronics themselves, because, as it turns out, it's more realistic for us to improve the efficiency of the electronics, that is, for us to boost the battery power. Moving on down on, Facebook says what are the advantages of curved surfaces? Alright,

So with phones, I don't think there is one. I think really the most the biggest advantage is that it lets a a manufacturer set their product apart from other products. It looks different from everything else, and therefore it gets a lot of attention. But practically, I don't think there's a whole lot of advantages to using a curved phone. For example, Uh, there's some curve phones that have said that it creates sort of a panoramic view if you're

if you're watching a movie and landscape. I think such a thing has got to be negligible. I can't imagine it being a real game changer. For something like a television, A curve surface might actually be a little useful. It might help increase the view ability from angles like off to the side of the TV. I have a television in my living room that's visible from the kitchen, but because it's a flat screen TV, and because the kitchen is almost uh ninety degrees away from the viewing area

of the screen, it's not a great view. A curve surface would give me a little bit better view of what was going on, at least on the right side of my television in in my case, so I could see that being a big benefit. But ultimately, I think

flexible displays are where it's at. I think curve displays are a stepping stone towards flexible displays, where we'll be able to actually fold old or roll up displays or create really interesting form factors that can mold to different shapes and sizes so that you know, we we can suddenly turn all sorts of different things into a display. So I think the curved UH services are just really a step toward that. Next we have this one from Donovan from Facebook who says, what do you guys think

might be the next great technological breakthrough? And he gives some examples of previous ones like telescopes, cell phones, radio, and so I think there are a lot of different potential technologies that could become the huge breakthrough of the future. Part of this is a little difficult to gauge simply because a lot of technologies in reality evolve over time.

If you listen to our episode about the Mythology of Area fifty one that are recorded with Ben Bolan, you heard me talk about how most technology, most inventions are in fact the product of years and years and years of work UH from various people. When ultimately you have an inventor put a bunch of work in and pull a bunch of ideas together to create something that then changes the world. But it's way more complicated than just saying this guy had a brilliant idea and then made

this awesome thing. And that being said, the technologies I think that are probably the super sci fi technologies of the future that could really shake things up. I mean, you've got the Internet of Things. That's a growing field right now. Whether or not that ever matures into something truly transformational remains to be seen. But the idea is

is really really compelling. The idea of all these different sensors and actuators and computers and even robots that are on the micro scale, tiny tiny things all over the place that are detecting different changes in the environment, including our interactions with the environment, and then send in commands so that the environment responds to those changes in ways

that will benefit us. That's a great idea. I mean, imagine that you are walking into your house and your house is reacting to your presence by doing everything from setting the temperature to your favorite level of comfort, something that the nest thermostatic can already do, to turning on music that you really like when you get home after

a hard day. Maybe it's even picking up on your health signs to figure out what kind of mood you're you're in, so that the music is exactly what you would want the one day when you come home, it might be something really soothing, and another day, when you come home and you're ready to get all jazzed up,

it might be much more fast paced music. These are the sort of basic ideas that the Internet of Things would love to be able to do, or at least the people developing it would love the Internet of Things to be able to do this sort of stuff. And it's certainly still in the future if it's going to happen at all. This is not the way the technology works right now, but I see that as a transformation. One another one is workable fusion. Now, nuclear power plants

depend upon fission right now. Fission, of course, is when an atom is split into two smaller atoms. Fusion is when you fuse two atoms together, making a heavier element in the process, and both methods produce energy. But fusion is one of those things that we've really been working on for a long time to try and figure out a way of getting more energy out of that reaction

than it requires to put into it. So in other words, we confuse stuff now, but usually it requires us to expend more energy than we're going to get out of the process, so it's a losing proposition. Now, there have been some really promising results in recent experiments where it looks like we could, at least in theory, have a few incidents where we get more energy out than we're pouring in. Now, the next step is to make it sustainable so that it's a reaction we can do over

and over again, it's not just a one off. And this could be a new way of generating lots of electricity, which would be fantastic. It would be a revolution in the way we generate electricity, so it can really change the world. And then there are some other ideas like quantum computers, the idea of using quantum bits or cubits to do computing. Again, this is not for all types

of computing. It's for very specific applications. But this would completely change cryptography, so we would have to rethink the way we do security. We would have to come up maybe using quantum cryptography to make sure things are secure um.

So that's certainly something that we have to keep an eye on whether or not we can ever make quantum computers stable enough to be reliable is another question, because anyone who studied anything about quantum physics knows the closer you look at it, the more likely it'll all fall apart. And finally, my last one is self reconfigurable modular robots. I love these things. So think of a robot that's made up of lots of other smaller robots, not necessarily

human in shape or size. It could be lots of different shapes, but these little modules, these individual robots, each can act independently of one another, or they can all act together and form different shapes and perform different tasks. And it all depends upon what the task is. So one task might require the robots to make a really long, skinny shape, and so they'll configure themselves into that formation, or another one might require them to form like a

ball and they'll do that. Uh. This sort of work could eventually lead to robots that are able to complete practically any task by reforming to the right form factor that's ideally suited to complete it. And I love that idea. Whether or not that ever makes it into consumer tech is another question. Entirely. We might just see that in

things like automation for manufacturing processes, which is great. One of the big problems with automation is that if you change your product, then you have to change the system to react to that product, because otherwise it's going to be going through the motions for something totally different that it was not, you know, that was designed to do specifically, you have to redesign the system to work with a

new product. If you have a a robot system that can redesign itself on the fly, then you don't have to worry about that. It saves a lot of time, it saves a lot of money. It means that product prices come down as a result, so it could really transform the world. So great question, Thanks so much for it. And finally from Kyle on Facebook. Why have tablets taken off? Now? I remember them coming out a while back and I thought they had potential but then faded away. So okay,

uh I lied. I have to mention Apple. Apples the reason, guys. Apple is the reason why tablets have become popular. Apple did the same thing with smartphones. They created a smartphone that really appealed to a specific section of the consumer market. Before the iPhone, smartphones were really just held by executives and bleeding edge early adopters. Otherwise, no one had a smartphone,

they all had cell phones. Uh. But the iPhone created a user interface and an experience that was really compelling, and that's what brought people over, and that's what led to things like Android and other competitors starting to come out with different user interfaces that also added to that. The same thing is true with tablets. There were tablets before the iPad. We've done episodes about this, about how

many different tablets there were. I think we did one that was just on the history of Windows tablets, which go back well before the iPad ever came out. But it was Apple that created again that user experience that was really compelling, and that is what in fact drove tablet sales. Allowed other developers to come out with competing products that were also compelling. So I don't own an iPad. I own I own an Android tablet, which I'll talk about in another episode. So uh, I think, I think,

really that's that's the end of that story. That's just where it goes, is that without Apple, we probably would be in the same place where tablets just would be a very niche market and most of us wouldn't own one. Well, that wraps it up for this episode of listener Mail. I hope you guys have enjoyed it. Again if you have any questions for me, whether it's a short form question that I can answer in a format like this, or it's something that you would like a treatment with

a full episode from beginning middle to end. It's all about how a technology works, or a company or personality in tech, or just a concept you want to have explained thoroughly. Let me know, send me a message my email is text up at how stuff works dot com, or brought me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle it all three is tech stuff hs W, and I will talk to you again answering your questions. Really since for more on this and thousands of other topics.

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