Tech News: Time's Up for These Apple Watches in the US

Apple appealed to the International Trade Commission or ITC about this matter about a ban on these products and asked the ITC to allow Apple to continue selling them until the appeal has been decided, and the ITC said no, Dice. This all has to do with a little blood oxygen sensor that's inside these particular models of Apple Watches, and how another company called Masimo claims that Apple has committed

patent infringement. Other models of the Apple Watch do not include the sensor, so they will not be part of the band. They will continue to be on sale in Apple stores. And while Apple may still win its appeal in the future, it means that for the moment it cannot legally sell those models of Apple watches here in the United States. If you've been dragging your feet and you plan to pick one up this weekend, and you happen to live in the US of A, I got

bad news for you. Actually, you've got the bad news because I just told you, Except there is one possible glint of light. Apple only has control over its stock in its own stores. If you go to a third party retailer like a Best Buy, those stores are not required to pull the models off of their shells, so they can continue selling them for as long as their supplies last. But once those supplies are gone, well, those stores are going to have to wait for the outcome

of the appeal, just like Apple is. One of the really big stories lurking in the background of twenty twenty three, which I'll cover in greater detail in an upcoming episode, is the Microsoft acquisition of video game giant Activision Blizzard. It was a corporate move that stirred up an awful lot of resistance all around the world for various reasons, and part of that story was about the CEO of Activision,

a guy named Bobby Kodik. He's, to put it lightly, a controversial figure Activision Blizzard had already been in the news before Microsoft even announced its plan to acquire the company because multiple former and current Activision employees at the time were stepping forward and alleging that the company had a toxic work culture and that executives turned a blind eye toward allegations of serious issues like sexual harassment. Those

claims went all the way up to Codek. Kodik essentially said he wasn't aware that there were any problems anyway. There have been calls for Kodek's resignation for a couple of years up to this point. Before twenty twenty three is over, it's finally going to happen. Microsoft released a memo revealing that Kodek will be stepping down on December

twenty ninth. A few other high ranking executives at Activision Blizzard will also be departing the company over the next few months after a transition period, but most of Activision's leadership structure is going to remain intact. There's also been a few changes over at Microsoft's Xbox division, with some leaders exiting the company and Microsoft largely focused on promoting from within to replace them, which is I think that's refreshing.

I'm sure I'll dive deeper into all of this really soon. Meanwhile, over at Sony, that company's game division is looking toward the near future in a pretty grim light. So according to tech Spot, some internal documents at Sony show a pessimist view of the next few years. These documents are now made public due to a different news story that I didn't cover about some hackers stealing a whole bunch

of data, something that Sony has actually had to face before. Apparently, the internal analysis came to the conclusion that Sony has not been as innovative and aggressive as it has been in years past. The company reached a point where it was outperforming Microsoft, especially in hardware sales. In fact, by some estimates, Sony was outperforming Microsoft at a rate of three to one. In the face of essentially a lack

of competition, the company got a little complacent. Now, the papers say Microsoft is leaping ahead and it's leaving Sony scrambling to catch up. This is largely due to that acquisition of Activision Blizzard, that company makes some extremely popular video games. The papers also indicate that Sony's analysts believe the company could face a one and a half billion dollar shortfall by twenty twenty seven. That's billion with a B. On the one hand, there's no arguing that's bad, right,

A billion and a half shortfall is not good. But then lighting a fire under the toukus of Sony to get competition up in the space ultimately ends up being a great thing for all gamers, whether they favor Sony or Microsoft. While it's tough for Sony, it's a pretty darn great thing in the long run for gamers in general. Now, if you want to learn more about this, you should check out the article by Cal Jeffrey in tech Spot.

It is titled Activision Apocalypse. Sony forecasts one point five billion dollar loss by twenty twenty seven after Microsoft merger. Not long ago, I talked about a recall that Tesla is facing that affects nearly every Tesla vehicle on the road here in the United States, and how it's really a software recall, so it's not gonna require Tesla owners

to drive to a dealership or anything. I can't say the same thing about Toyota, which is recalling around a million cars here in the United States across both Toyota and Lexus brands, and this is due to an issue with airbags that are in the front passenger side of vehicles. Namely, these air bags may not deploy in the event of a crash, which, as you can imagine, severely diminishes their

effectiveness as an airbag. Apparently, the issue is in the sensors that detect if a passenger is in the passenger seat, so a defective design has resulted in some cases with a short circuit issue. This completed circuit indicates that there's no one in the passenger seat, so you could be sitting there, and because there's this short circuit in the sensors, it thinks that you're not there, so if you're in a crash, it does not deploy the passenger side airbag,

and that can result in really serious injuries. Obviously, So the recall is for a selection of Toyota and Lexis vias that have model years between twenty twenty and twenty twenty two. In at least one model's case, I recommend looking into it if you drive a Toyota, just to see if your vehicle is one of the ones that needs repair. Toyota is going to offer free repairs for this issue at no cost to the owner, and the company says it will be reaching out to customers early

next year. In any case, just keep an eye out. If you drive a Toyota, you may want to make sure that you can go by and get this fixed. And hopefully you'll never need it, but it's good to have it fixed in case you do. A collection of journalists at Reuter's published an amazing piece titled Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts at Long New were defective and it is well worth reading, so high recommendation that you go to Reuters dot com and find this article

because it's fantastic. But the headline tells you the gist of what takes up most of the story. That Tesla customers have encountered all sorts of problems that when you look at them and aggregate, you think, oh, well, this is clearly a default in design or manufacturing, because the same problem is happening to multiple people in different vehicles.

And some of these are minor issues, but some of them are potentially life threatening failures, particularly if you were operating the vehicle, say on the highway when it happened.

But Tesla's response to a lot of these issues was to claim that the fault lie with the drivers, not with the vehicles, that somehow these drivers had done something that caused the damage to the vehicle, when in fact, internal documents show that Tesla engineers were aware of problems in car design and manufacturing that led to the manifestation

of these issues. Now, according to the Reuter's investigation, this whole story stretches back at least seven years, so for the better part of a decade, the company, Tesla, has tried to pass the buck in these cases and to put blame on drivers. It's something that has affected thousands of Tesla owners, and not just here in the United States.

In fact, it's a damning fact that Tesla ultimately issued some recalls in China hardware recalls after facing regulators who were not having any of Tesla's nonsense and forcing the company to recall certain vehicles in order to make fixes, sometimes multiple fixes because the initial fix didn't actually fix the problem. But here in the United States, Tesla has largely been able to avoid that and continue to make the argument that any failures and vehicles were due to

user error. Essentially, it's pretty ugly stuff, and the report in Reuters is extensive. It is a very very long article that covers a lot more detail than what I've just said, but I highly recommend you read the whole thing. And again, that article is tip Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts at long new word defective. Okay, got some more news items to get through, including one about some driverless car info, but first let's take a quick

break to thank our sponsor. We're back. So yesterday, that being Wednesday, the twentieth of December, way Mo, the Alphabet spinoff that develops and operates autonomous vehicles, released a report that said collectively its driverless cars had driven more than seven million miles. The company also claimed that in the course of driving those seven million miles, there had only been three accidents that involved a minor injury and nothing

more serious than that. Now, statistically, this suggests that driverless cars are safer than those piloted by human beings. However, it gets super tricky to do this kind of comparison. You have to take a lot of variables into account. For instance, where does WEIMO drive? Because the accident rates for one city are different from other cities. So the answer to the question where does WEIMO drive? Is primarily Phoenix, Arizona,

and San Francisco, California. Then you have to look at what are the average accident rates that involve injuries in those specific places, and can you compare per million of human miles driven versus million of autonomous vehicle miles driven. So, according to ours Technica, if you were to look at the number of accidents that involve an injury, should humans be driving those seven million miles, it would be closer

to thirteen incidents as opposed to three. So there are ten more accidents per seven million miles driven if the drivers are human beings as oppose to autonomous But again, it's not really that simple to get into meaningful comparisons. You actually need way more miles driven by autonomous vehicles. However, according to WEIMO, Phoenix drivers get into accidents about three times more often than driverless vehicles driving in Phoenix, and

in San Francisco, it's even more dramatic. Human drivers rack up accidents six times as often as the driverless vehicles did. Now, again, these comparisons are tricky to make. We don't have enough data to really definitively say anything, but common sense does tell us that an autonomous vehicle, if it is properly designed and it operates well, should be safer than human drivers. It should have far greater awareness of its surroundings. It

should be able to react much more quickly. It makes sense that it should be safer, and that is actually one of the biggest selling points of autonomous drivers. Right. So in a way, this news is not surprising. It would be shocking if weimo said, well, we try, but turns out that travelist cars are ten times more dangerous than human driven vehicles. That would be shocking. We would start to think we were in maximum overdrive or something. And if you don't know what that is, I hesitate

to tell you to look it up. Part of me wants you to look it up, because I mean, Emilio ESTEVEZKT y'all, and a green Goblin semitruck. I'm getting off track. We have had cases of autonomous vehicles that were involved in truly catastrophic accidents that led to tragedy. But we also have to remember human beings are responsible for tragic accidents. Essentially every single day, I mean, thousands of people in

the US die from traffic accidents each year. It's just that it's really notable when it's an autonomous vehicle that's at fault. Right, There's something kind of scary and sinister about that, And we're just accepting of the fact that human beings are responsible for these kinds of accidents. But I do get it. I mean, like the thought of giving up control to some other entity and then being in an accident through no fault of your own, that's terrifying,

I understand. But I do think that this report shows we are moving in the correct direction. Right. I still want a future with autonomous vehicles because I do believe that when that technology is sufficiently sophisticated and safe, it will mean tens of thousands of people will avoid being involved in a fatal accent. Now, ironically, they'll never know that because they'll just live. Right. You can't know that

you avoided a deadly accident. You just did. And but I think that when you look back and you think about the thousands of people who have passed away because of traffic accidents and the impact that has on their immediate circle and then society as a whole, you just start to see where autonomous vehicles could be a huge benefit. But we want to make sure that we are implementing that when the technology is actually ready to take on that burden. So I think this is a step in

that direction. I would be fibbing. However, if I said I was just as optimistic about it as I was a decade ago, a lot more cautious about it these days. On a related note, if you live in California or Nevada and you find yourself driving behind a Mercedes Benz and you notice that it has these weird turquoise tail lights, well that means you're actually behind a vehicle that's in an autonomous mode. They actually are piloting this in California Nevada.

They got approval to do it where they are deploying a level three driver assist feature, but when it's in operation, these turquoise tail lights will come on. I think that's a neat idea. Now I've rambled on about autonomous cars a lot already, so I'm not going to go into more detail about this, but I highly recommend Jonathan M. Gittland's article in Ours Technica titled Turquoise tail lights tell you this Mercedes is driving autonomously. The headline is just

the tip of the iceberg. As to the entire discussion about autonomous vehicles. It's cute, but Gitland did an amazing job. You should check out that article. And again, I have no connection with Ours Technica or Gitland or any of the articles or authors that I mentioned in this episode. These are just works that I think are really good and you should read them. Laura Pattison of CNN has a piece titled Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough

three times. This is worth celebrating, so as a reminder. Today's nuclear power plants, the ones that are generating electricity for the power grid, they work through the process of nuclear fission. That's when you take a heavy atom and you split that atom apart, which releases a tremendous amount of energy as well as some subatomic particles that help keep the process going, and you harness that energy to

generate electricity. Nuclear fusion is different. You take two very lightweight atoms, like two hydrogen atom, and you force them to be very very very close to each other. When you do this, they fuse together and as they do, they release a tremendous amount of energy that then you can also harness for electricity. Now, unlike fission, you don't end up generating radioactive byproducts. With fusion, there's no danger of a nuclear meltdown either. Fusion is how stars work.

Our Sun emits energy through the process, and if we could nail it here on Earth, we would potentially have an energy source that can meet all of our needs for the foreseeable future. I won't say forever, because we humans are really good at taking more than what we need. Anyway. This story is about how scientists at the Livermore National Laboratory in California have achieved nuclear fusion multiple times over the last year, and that these reactions actually released more

energy than was required for ignition. Now that last bit does need a little bit of an asterisk. The reactions released more in energy that was contained within the lasers that forced the two atoms to come together. The energy within the lasers was at one level, the release of energy was at a higher level. However, in order to energize the lasers, we had to tap into more energy

than was emitted in the release. So it's still a net loss when you're looking at a big picture, and that's something that has to change right otherwise you're going to be pouring more energy into the process than you're getting out of it, and ultimately it's a losing proposition. However, this is still an amazing scientific achievement that could lead

us to a future of plentiful and clean energy. For an article recommendation, check out Ariel Shapiro's piece in The Verge titled the four podcast stories that will Shape twenty twenty four. I don't often comment on the podcast business. It feels a little bit too much like inside Baseball to me, and goodness knows, I deal with it all the time as an executive producer, so I get sick of it too. Plus when the news is rough, and this year got a little rough in podcasting, y'all, it

gets a bit demoralizing to talk about it. But this piece in The Verge covers lots of things that I've been observing all year. It's worth looking into if you're curious about the business that is show subset podcasting. It's always good to educate yourself, especially if you're thinking about getting into the business, because knowing what the environment is and the trends that are going can really inform you so that you make good decisions, like whether or not

you actually want to go through with it. All right, That's enough. With all that, though, I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where whoever you listen to your favorite shows.