Tech News Weekly 395 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Dan Moren joins me to talk about, well, rumors of an A18 Pro MacBook and the iPhone 17 Air. Afterward we talk about Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. Yes, Samsung has held its event and there's a lot the company announced. Before Joe Supan of CNET stops by to talk about how AI is heading into the Internet to grab obituaries and make money off of them, before we round things out with the AI browser wars, OpenAI and Perplexity, both working on an AI browser. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly episode 395, with Dan Moren and me, Mikah Sargent, Recorded Thursday, July 10th, 2025. Galaxy Unpacked, folds and flips. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined this week by special guest host Dan Moren. Welcome to the show, Dan.

0:01:31 - Dan Moren
It's always a pleasure to be here, Mikah. Thank you for having me on what is always, I assume, a special week if I'm here.

0:01:37 - Mikah Sargent
It is indeed a special week if you are here, because it is a week that is unlike a typical week, and therefore it is special For people who are tuning in for the first time or for those of you who have forgotten since last week when we did the show. This is the time in the show where we share our stories of the week, things we've been reading about that we think are interesting, that we want to share with all of you, and it starts off with you, dan. Tell us what is your topic.

0:02:08 - Dan Moren
With me. Well, let's talk rumors, because I'm here and it's Apple rumor time. An interesting rumor that's been floating around last week or two is the possibility that Apple will release a MacBook powered by the A18 Pro chip. Now you're probably sitting there thinking, powered by the A18 Pro chip? Now you're probably sitting there thinking what's the big deal? But you also may be thinking, hmm, doesn't Apple power its Macs with M series chips? And you would be correct. The A18 Pro is an iPhone chip. Dun dun, dun dun. Yeah, nobody saw that coming. So why might Apple decide that it wants to put an iPhone chip in a laptop? Well, there's a few possible reasons, one of which is guess what it's all about cost, and not just cost to folks like you and me who might want to buy said laptop, but cost to apple for producing that laptop. Yes, let's be clear, that's the most important thing every time. How, how much will this cost Apple?

The A18 Pro is the chip that is in the iPhone 16 Pro currently, and that is obviously one that they produce quite a few of right. I mean, these iPhone chips get produced in huge scale, and they are produced to be power efficient. They're produced to be cost efficient to a certain degree and they have a lot of other benefits going for them. They're generally pretty good chips I mean anybody using an iPhone 16 Pro, which is the cutting edge you know for Apple iPhones at this point. You know they're no slouch, obviously, but they still could be a little cheaper to produce than even the M1 chips that power the oldest Apple Silicon Macs. And because Apple has started to move away from those M1 chips right, I mean, those chips are five years old, right, the current generation is the M4, with the M5 expected to be on the way and it's possible that Apple might want to phase out those M1 chips. You can still find those M1 MacBook Airs actually available at retailers like Walmart. Apple has been producing the those M1 MacBook Airs actually available at retailers like Walmart. Apple has been producing the older M1 MacBook Air at a lower cost, which is kind of interesting.

And cost is not something that Apple tends to compete on, right, you know the base level MacBook Air, which is the cheapest Mac you know new quote unquote Mac starts at about $1,000. And they've been pretty consistent about hitting that $999 price point. But the challenges are the competition. There's a lot of Chromebooks out there that obviously go for a lot cheaper. There's a lot of PC laptops that go for a lot cheaper and Apple has always been pretty content to seed that market.

But the idea of releasing a computer powered by this A18 Pro iPhone chip might make it possible for them to target that sub $1,000 demographic and obviously there are a lot of people who might be interested in such a thing. And there are a lot of markets where cost is the most important thing. I mean, I think particularly of education is a great example where cost really drives decision making, and an A18 Pro powered MacBook might be something that's more compelling to large institutions, including education institutions, and there's a lot of people who just want the cheapest MacBook they can buy, and right now that's been again a thousand dollars. Obviously a little bit less if you can find it on sale or if you're willing to go with that M1 Air, the A18 Pro also in some cases would be as good as, if not better. The 18 Pro also in some cases would be as good as, if not better than, the M1, which is again five years old. So there might be some trade-offs to such a machine. It would likely support USB-C but not Thunderbolt. You know there might be some other limitations in graphics performance or what have you, but generally it seems like it would be a pretty powerful device. Now, we talked about scale a little bit before too, and I think that's an important part of this equation.

Apple doesn't make nearly as many Macs as it does iPhones, right? They sell millions upon millions of iPhones every single year, and so if you're producing something with a iPhone chip, you're producing that in very large quantities and therefore you have some cost benefits, right? Because the more you produce, the cheaper it often is per unit. So being able to move those chips into other devices, such as a MacBook, might produce some cost savings, especially if they want to you know, ramp down the line producing that older M1. And it could have some benefits in terms of power efficiency.

Obviously, it's designed to be in a phone, right? So these things tend to be much more efficient. Not that the current Apple Silicon level ones aren't already pretty efficient, but adding in something that's designed to be in a phone might be even better, might make them lighter. You might be able to trade off for a little less battery capacity for efficiency. There's a lot of possibilities there with something like an A18 Pro powered MacBook. Obviously, we don't know a lot of possibilities there with something like an 18 Pro powered MacBook. Obviously, we don't know a lot about this product because this is all rumor, and whether it would even be able to hit set a price point or whether Apple would still, of course, want to make a hefty profit on it. That will remain to be seen?

0:06:57 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, is there any precedent for Apple? Apple putting out a product that is lower powered and how the company goes about communicating it in such a way that it's not going well. This is not as good as the other stuff that we have, but here is how it still is awesome and does that make sense. How do we foresee Apple kind of selling this thing?

0:07:36 - Dan Moren
You know it's not something they've done on the Mac recently. I think the best example to look at is something like the recent iPhone 16E and before it the SE line of iPhones. Those are phones that are explicitly designed to come in underneath the sort of base level cost of the quote unquote new products that exist in those categories. So you know, if the iPhone 16 comes out, it'll have a price point at like 800 bucks so you can get an iPhone 16E, obviously for a bit cheaper. It comes with some trade-offs, right. It's not as powerful, it has an older chip in it, it doesn't necessarily have all the bells and whistles, right, that a brand new top of the line iPhone might have, and so that's something where they can kind of communicate.

Look, this is something we're aiming at. That's more potentially aimed at people for whom the buying decision is not about how do I get the most power, how do I get the newest thing, how do I get the best thing. It's about how do I get the most affordable thing, and that's an important metric still, and it's not one that they've really taken with the MacBook or the Mac line at all I mean the closest you have there is like the Mac mini, which is also designed as a more affordable computer.

But even that comes with trade-offs. Right, you got to buy a display or have a display. You got to buy your peripherals. So Apple has not really played that game. A lot of times of like, hey, how can we make this a cheap product? Right, like there was that craze in the two thousands for netbooks real cheap small laptops and Apple never really played in that. Right, it made the MacBook air, which was a very small, powerful laptop but it wasn't cheap, and so I think it's interesting to see how Apple is going to potentially spin that.

As you said, how do we tell the people this is still a great Mac? Right, it's still the best Mac that that amount of money can buy. And I think looking at both the iPhone 16E and the Apple Watch SE, which is also sort of occupies a similar place, you can see kind of where they might make some trade-offs. I think the base level iPad is a great example of that too. Right, the $350 iPad, which is still a very, very competitive device, but it's a lot cheaper than going into, say, an iPad Air, which I think is over $500 now. So they do occasionally dip their toe there. It just hasn't traditionally been something they've done for the Mac and I think they're realizing that potentially there's still a lot of upside for them to address an audience that they don't appeal to right now, or at least are appealing to in this very small subset, by doing things like having that M1 Air available through Walmart.

0:10:08 - Mikah Sargent
Now, that is kind of one of the thin svelte options. Yeah, we're trying to figure out a way to segue into other thin svelte options. It's very easy to wedge it in because it's so thin.

I see what you're doing. So we've got, yes, the potential for a MacBook and, as always is the case with this tech stuff, we'll have to wait and see if it comes. But there's another rumor of another device that I hope you could tell us a little bit about and kind of where you like. How believable do you think this is?

0:10:49 - Dan Moren
This is the rumor that there is a thinner iPhone coming with the iPhone 17 line this year. It has been sort of tentatively called the iPhone Air, because that's a word that Apple really likes throwing on its products, and the sort of driving factor here is it seems to be a thinner iPhone than they've offered before. Now where does this fit in the iPhone 17 lineup? Well, in the past Apple's experimented with trying different form factors for some of its other devices. Right, they're pretty set on the base level iPhone 17,. Your iPhone, whatever number, year it is, there's usually a Pro version that is the same size, and then the pro version also has a max version which is the same as the pro but larger. Fine, In the past we've had both the iPhone plus, then like the 16 plus this past year, which is the same as sort of that base level iPhone 16, but larger. And if you go back a few years, we also had the iPhone mini, which was the same as the base level but smaller. Neither of those seem to be huge sellers for Apple. They've tried that a lot but, like you know, playing around with the different screen sizes hasn't driven, I think, as many sales as they hope. So this year we're going to change a different dimension. Instead of making it bigger or smaller, we're going to make it thinner Um, with the hopes that people like thin light phones.

This will not necessarily be smaller, it will probably be. I think they said it's a little smaller than the Plus model that we have this year, somewhere around 6.5 to 6.6 inches, which is bigger than the iPhone 17, 16, if you're sort of assuming those are continuing the same size, but not as big as the larger one. Boy, you think this is going to simplify things and instead it's just more confusing. The other part that makes this a little confusing is that there's some theory that it may be more expensive than some of these base models and because it's thinner, it may have some trade-offs in terms of what things it can have in it.

Right, Like camera thickness. You know it often makes a difference in terms of how many camera lenses you have or what kind of camera lenses you can have. Obviously, it makes a difference in terms of battery life, in terms of how much battery you can fit in there. So it's unclear exactly what that's going to look like here and whether they're going to position it as kind of a fancier version of the iPhone that will compete more with the Pro, or whether it's just like, hey, you can get the base of iPhone, but you can get it thinner. So yeah, we don't. Again, we don't know. It is sort of speculated to be the thinnest iPhone that Apple has made for many years. Some people say it's thinner, maybe even than the iPhone 6, which is more than 10 years old. Obviously, phones have changed a lot since then. You scratch your head because you don't think the iPhone 6 is 10 years old.

0:13:32 - Mikah Sargent
That just feels like a long time ago.

0:13:35 - Dan Moren
It was a long time ago, Mikah, it's an odd comparison, I guess, for me I think it's because it's the thinnest iPhone that they had prior to sort of the modern era. They've been getting thicker and thicker over the years as they've built up things like battery life to support all those additional features. They've had to write bigger screens, more vibrant screens, more cameras, you know, higher speed processors all of that stuff means generally more thickness. But this is something where they're trying to really, I think, kind of see how small can they get it. And you know, going back to something like the iPhone 6, which I think was I don't remember how big it was five, six millimeters, you know those are much 6.9, 6.9 millimeters with the iPhone 6.

The current 16 Pros are about 8.25 millimeters. So we're talking, you know, millimeters obviously may seem very small, but percentage-wise you're talking a pretty big percent change from the sort of current level of thickness among these phones. Now, if that's enough to draw people in, that's unclear, right, like, is it gonna be? Are people gonna be willing to take the trade off? But, like a lot of time, physical changes in the cases are something that draw a drive adoption, because people want something that looks new.

0:14:49 - Joe Supan
So that's an advantage for Apple here.

0:14:51 - Dan Moren
Yeah, they want something that looks different. They want something that looks new and, if it really has a compelling look to it, that looks very different from what they're offering in sort of the standard models, different colors or different finishes or something like that. It might be something that really peps up the iPhone line sales because it will convince people to upgrade.

0:15:10 - Mikah Sargent
That makes sense as far as that goes. I mean, I there's so much conversation around like whether there's a true shelf life for like foldable devices and what Apple would do there, and it's interesting to see where the company is, you know, reportedly going in spite of, in some, what the market might suggest, but also, I think, for Apple itself, what Apple's own market seems to desire. And I think there's always kind of a balancing act there and a bit of a game, which I think is where it's helpful that Apple has kind of broken out this other phone that comes later kind of situation.

0:15:59 - Dan Moren
It's the other phone, yeah, and also, we've got this yeah. I don't know. I do sit there thinking maybe four phones is just too many, Like I don't know, it does feel like a lot. I understand the idea of trying to cover all your angles right and try to find make something for everybody, but there is a point at which maybe you've made too many phones, yeah.

0:16:23 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, all right, we need to take a quick break. Before we come back with my story of the week.

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All right, back from the break. And yes, if you didn't know, Samsung just held its Galaxy or holding its Galaxy Unpacked event and Samsung introduced a full refresh of. We just talked about a foldable phones and smartwatches. To be clear, smartwatches not foldable, just the phones foldable, with slimmer designs, brighter displays and a deeper infusion of Gemini AI. Leading the charge the Galaxy Z Fold 7, the Z Flip 7, joined by a budget-friendly Flip 7 FE and two new Galaxy watches. But the biggest trend from this event wasn't hardware. It was how AI is being used to reshape the way these devices feel, respond and even look.

Starting with the Galaxy Z Fold 7, it's thinner, it's lighter and, no, it doesn't have an S Pen. It's Samsung's thinnest and lightest foldable to date, at 8.9 millimeters folded, weighs just 215 grams. It did drop the S Pen support in order to slim down the design. So in order to make the screen thinner, removing that digitizer, that makes for the thinner build, it uses a titanium frame with the new flex hinge for better durability and a less visible crease, and the display size has actually been bumped up to eight inches. Internal upgrades include a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and a much bigger battery. The camera system is led by a 200 megapixel main sensor and updated selfie cams. They're no longer under the display and it starts at about $2,000. It comes with Android 16 out of the box and is shipping soon.

In the CNET piece, they said part of the reason the new foldable is so slim is that the company was free to remove that digitizer that was needed to process stylus inputs. Now I had hoped to have someone on the show to talk about Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. I reached out to people and everybody was there at the event, or I had one person who was stuck at airports with storms after the event, so it was rough to do that. So that's why I'm giving you a nice little summary here. There was also the Galaxy Z Flip 7, which is bigger inside and brighter outside. The flex window now stretches edge to edge, you've got thinner bezels and the brightness gets up to 2600 nits. The internal screen is 6.9 inches and has better water resistance as well, with a 50 megapixel main camera, 10 bit HDR processing built in, galaxy AI features, including something called the Now Bar and the Now Brief, which can give you kind of up to the date, up to the moment information about you know, your calendar and all that kind of stuff. And it starts at $1,100.

And then there's the Z Flip 7 FE, which is a foldable for the rest of us, a budget. Take on the Flip 6. It's got trimmed down specs. It's got Galaxy AI, don't you worry, or Gemini in this case, and comes with the Exynos 2400 chip. Small, smaller battery, fewer display, flourishes, and you can only get it in white or black, but it's $900, so that makes it incredibly affordable in comparison.

And then I want to mention real quick the Galaxy Watch 8 and Watch 8 Classic Thinner design, squircle shape, brighter AMOLED display with 3000 nits of brightness, bigger batteries. And it has this feature that's kind of interesting it's called an antioxidant measurer. It uses the watch sensor, pressed against your thumb, to kind of give you insights, allegedly, into what you might need for antioxidants. So you know, getting rid of those free radicals. And the Watch 8 Classic brings back the rotating bezel, available in 46 millimeters only.

So let's talk a little bit about these devices. One thing that I've found interesting in the watch lineup in particular is how companies are, because we've kind of laid the foundation right. You've got a watch that gives you notifications and then also tracks your basic health metrics. So how do you make things that are new and stand out? It seems like features like the antioxidant measurement are perhaps something to make it stand out. The usefulness of that I don't know, but yeah, I mean, what do you think? Do you wish that the Apple Watch had a rotating face on it and an antioxidant measure?

0:23:57 - Dan Moren
I'm still stuck on the antioxidant measure, like I got too many oxidants. That's always my problem. We got to get some high antioxidants in there. Yeah, I don't know.

There's always a question, especially as they add more of these sensors, like how useful are they right? I mean, we have seen stuff like blood oxygen, for example, is a good you know? Was it useful? It has its applications. Um, there are some questions about reliability, right, and whenever you have questions about reliability related to health and wellness features, you really start to ask some deeper questions about whether or not those things are useful if they're not reliable. And I think you've seen a bit of a topping out when it comes to people wanting to do things that are potentially more helpful from a health perspective but are are a lot harder, like glucose or blood pressure. Those are hard problems to solve when you're dealing with a watch and, in the meantime, if we can find a way to measure antioxidants by putting your thumb against it, how many people are going to take their watch off every day to check the antioxidants by putting the thumb against it?

0:24:56 - Mikah Sargent
yeah, and I can't, I don't find that particularly plausible.

0:24:59 - Dan Moren
That's, that's my feeling. Um, as far as some of the other stuff goes, I don't know a rotating I know.

I remember when, like you know, actual watches had like the rotating, I love a little fidget on my wrist yeah, it's good this is and that's a great fidget like spinner thing, but I just don't.

I'm not sure how you useful that is with a digital what like in the analog watches it used to mean something because you would like you can kind of do time zones tracking by like. Okay, I'm going to set the offset sort of here, but I'm not sure on a digital watch what that is for. So I think the arms race for smartwatches has gotten a lot harder just because it does feel like there are fewer things to add. From sort of a hardware features perspective. It's amazing all the stuff that's already been crammed in there, considering we're talking about something the size of a watch, obviously, and they have these incredibly complex systems on chips inside of them and all this functionality that's packed in there. But at a certain point I feel like we've hit a diminishing returns thing where every year it doesn't feel like, hey, we got to announce a new feature, we have a new thing on our watch, and the answer is cram this sensor in there and maybe people want it. Yeah.

0:26:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and that's what it's feeling like, and it's trying to find sensor options that aren't going to get you sued and have to have the feature removed.

I do think that I've heard from the everyday people who are maybe not as techie, who seem really enamored of the idea of a not with the watch but with the foldable mindset and kind of going back in some ways to that flip and fold and all that jazz. I remain skeptical in the sense of if there's this potential for the display to end up having a crease in it and it doesn't last as long as one would hope. That doesn't seem worth it, and I'm also sort of put off by the idea that when I fold it in half it's two times as thick as it was when I already. Yeah, it doesn't solve the problem.

0:27:21 - Dan Moren
I am laughing a little bit also at these pictures of the Z Flip 7 and the Flip FE, because those little displays on the outside with the little widgets on them could not look more Apple-like. I'm sorry, they are very, very.

0:27:35 - Mikah Sargent
Apple-like, incredibly Apple-like. I'm sorry, they are very, very Apple-like.

0:27:37 - Dan Moren
You know it's fine. Whatever, I think you're right, I don't know. It seems to me that the ones that fold like old school style, right, like our old flip phones used to be where they fold open like top to bottom. I don't see the utility in that one. That one strikes me as kind of strange because you have this little like widget-y screen on the outside and then you flip it open and it's like a normal phone on the inside but, as you pointed out, it's twice as large and thick. It's like a big, thick wallet you're carrying around with you. The ones that fold sort of side, like book-like, I think are more interesting, if only because the idea that sometimes you might want something that has a larger screen, like, oh, you know what? I'm watching video, I'm on the plane. Isn't it cool that I can flip this open and watch on a larger screen.

But I think one of the things that's held that back on the Android side has been the Android tablet interface. Like a lot of apps are not designed because Android doesn't have a huge tablet market. Like a lot of the you know apps are not designed for tablet sizes. So I think that's held that back a little bit. The hardware might be there but the software isn't ready to quite support it. And, to your point, depending on how visible that crease is, you know, it may or may not impact the utility of that larger screen. And, to your point, depending on how visible that crease is, it may or may not impact the utility of that larger screen.

And again, how thin can you get it? This is one of the rumors about that iPhone 17 Air we discussed earlier in the show is that by making your base phone thinner, if you slap two of them together to get a foldable, it might be more palatable when you fold it together. So it's interesting and they keep pushing it forward. Yeah, I think right now it's still perhaps more of a solution in search of a problem, absolutely.

0:29:24 - Mikah Sargent
Well, there was one other announcement that Samsung made that kind of stuck out, which is that Samsung Wallet has added Buy Now, pay Later support. We've seen that kind of hit the swath of the wallet era, or wallet section, in terms of Apple adding buy now, pay later options, and now Samsung joins the fold, as it were. Oh, I see what you did there, dan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today on the show. If people would like to keep up with what you're doing, where's a good place for them to go to do that?

0:30:05 - Dan Moren
Well, if you'd like to read what I'm writing about tech, you can go over sixcolors.com, where I cover all things Apple with my pal Jason Snell. I'm also on a bunch of podcasts, including Clockwise Every Week with Mikah over on relay.fm and the Rebound, which you can find at reboundcast.com. I'm also a science fiction author. If you want to find my books, as well as everything else I do, you can go to dmorin.com.

0:30:23 - Mikah Sargent
Wonderful. Thank you, Dan See you soon.

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All right, we are back from the break and I am joined by Joe Supan of CNET, who joins us to talk about, I think honestly, when I reached out, I find it to be a rather harrowing tale, and so thank you for being here on the show today.

0:33:16 - Joe Supan
Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

0:33:17 - Mikah Sargent
Thanks for having me Absolutely, so let's kick things off. Thanks for having me Absolutely, so let's kick things off. You, in your piece, kind of open with an example of a chat bot impersonating, in a way a the story of a deceased loved one using information scraped from an obituary. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about what happened here?

0:33:38 - Joe Supan
Yeah, so last year my sister passed away and she passed away early in the morning and later that day, like that afternoon, my mom got a text from our aunt saying that she saw this obituary page appear. That was kind of weird, seemed to have a lot of false information in it. So we, as soon as we got that text, we we looked at it and then I googled my sister's name just to see if there was any other things out there. And like right away, even just you know hours after she'd passed away, there were already four or five like obituaries that we had no knowledge of that were like right at the top of Google search results. So they had really I don't know this. This process had happened just like really quickly before we could even kind of wrap our heads around it.

0:34:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so so to be clear, this happened and no one in the family had written an obituary and passed it off to anyone, and it just simply like appeared out of nowhere.

0:34:50 - Joe Supan
Yeah, no, we had nothing to do with it. I mean we were, we were just reeling it was the same day, um and yeah, writing this article, I learned that is just how this works, like when these AI botnets will detect like a flood of words, like passed away or something like that, and the pages will just be created generally automatically. I mean, sometimes they have some human like interference, but they really just kind of kick into gear and if there's enough people talking about it, there'll be more pages that are created.

0:35:27 - Mikah Sargent
Wow. So of course we know that many obituaries, when time is taken, are written with love and care, often by grieving family members. I kind of wanted to talk to you about your, and perhaps your family's, reaction to, arguably, the ethical issues that arise when AI models harvest this kind of deeply personal content and, as you talked about, get it wrong in so many ways. And I mean something that really stuck with me in reading your piece was kind of like this term gets used a lot, but there was almost a sense of like this gaslighting aspect of you, even maybe going well, I guess that sort of makes sense, but that's really not how she, you know, like it just seemed like a lot to process all at once.

0:36:25 - Joe Supan
Yeah, totally, and gaslighting is a good word for it. I hadn't thought about it like that, but that is what it feels like because it is. I'm sure a lot of people who have had these, seen these obituaries probably feel this. But it's like there are such personal details embedded in them because they are taken from these really sincere posts on social media so like it will get some things like eerily correct, but then other things will just be like so off base and offensively off base in a lot of ways, like if my in my sister's obituary they were saying like she died of autism and like she had all these health issues, and a lot of times when I was like looking at these things they would like they would really allude to kind of like a tragic cause of death or something. So I can imagine for many families it's like wait, that's not what happened. I think people feel a lot of like anger and hurt in those moments.

0:37:24 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, and that anger and hurt, I think, is one of the main aspects of why I wanted to talk to you about this, because I was curious in doing, you know, in going through this and experiencing this, but then taking it and channeling it into a piece where you kind of share hey, you're not alone if this has happened to you, but also be on the lookout for this. You know, there's a challenge that pops up in the first place, write an obituary. These are often published and posted online with good reason, so that people can learn about what happened. And, can you know, share condolences. And the second, that that's posted publicly. Then it's out there, and then the AI bots come in and I mean, do we know, were you able to find anything that people can do to protect this information from being scraped? Because it sounds like even if, as you mentioned, even if you didn't post something, you didn't share an obituary online, yet somehow these bots are still gaining access to this information and posting it online.

0:38:37 - Joe Supan
Yeah, I think it's like by the time you've written the obituary, it's like too late Once your obituary, once the legitimate obituary is out there, it's like that will that will appear on Google's results first, but that usually happens a couple, two, three days after someone passes away. So it's really that gap, like those first few days. That's where these bots are capitalizing. So they're just scraping social media comments. Basically, they're not formal obituaries. As far as what people can do to protect themselves from that, I don't know that there is anything that can do to stop their, their posts from being scraped. I would just say, like, the more you can record it when you see it, to like Google, Facebook wherever it's appearing, I think that will like lessen the reach of these kinds of pages.

0:39:41 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Now you talk a little bit about some of the, because people might be wondering why? What is gained by posting these sites and these different, you know, obituaries? Can you talk about the motivation behind it? And a little bit, I think, about copyright rules as it pertains to this, which I found kind of surprising, I guess.

0:40:14 - Joe Supan
Yeah, yeah, the why, I think, is it's really just it's ad sales. I think it's really just it's ad sales. It's just if getting one click will add up to like a penny or two and if you do it at volume you will make some money, and I don't think it's very much. I think this is often happening in other countries, like one guy I talked to who runs a bunch of these pages was in Nigeria and he said he makes about $100 a week on this. So it's not like crazy lucrative. They don't need to get a ton of views on these pages to make it worth it. It's just like there's such a low bar for entry to create them that they can just do it at a huge scale. And in terms of the copyright laws it's complicated. But basically what a lawyer I talked to told me is that a deceased person has a lot fewer rights than a living person when it comes to things like defamation or copyright. So it would be very hard to pursue legal action against any of these websites.

0:41:34 - Mikah Sargent
You did mention I think you talked a little bit about it Google and Facebook making some changes to mitigate the issue, about it Google and Facebook making some changes to mitigate the issue. Maybe you could talk about that process. But also, are there any pro? Have you heard from any of the companies that are doing this or, I guess, the smaller sites that are doing this about steps they're taking to prevent the the inaccurate information from being published? Or is it really just a matter of kind of a Wild West situation?

0:42:06 - Joe Supan
Yeah, you took the words right out of my mouth. It is a Wild West situation. Like these websites that are publishing these things are so small and like they come and go so much. Like even when I was tracking this over just a few weeks, and it was like one that I would see every day, that would be posting all the time, all of a sudden it wouldn't be there and, um, I mean, I I think I counted about 25 of them just when I was was looking at this, but I I got the feeling that, you know, it is probably much larger than that.

So I don't think these sites really have any kind of like responsibility to standards or inaccurate information. I think the responsibility really lies with the, the platforms that people are finding them on, namely Google and Facebook, and both of those companies told me that like, yeah, they're getting better at detecting this stuff, like I sent them these examples and they were like we've taken those down, but, as far as I could tell, like I continued to check after they told me that and it was like, yeah, this process happens every single day and it's still showing up on those platforms.

0:43:23 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, I want to kind of pull it back, just because there's a lot of conversation right now with AI in particular and its scraping of the internet. You know, do you feel this is exemplary of the criticism surrounding AI bots scraping the web, and perhaps when it comes in particularly to these emotionally sensitive areas of the web and how it's being used in this way?

0:44:07 - Joe Supan
Yeah, I think it's a small corner of this phenomenon and I think most people I've talked to about this story had no idea that this was happening. But I think it's like an evocative example of how, like something really personal can be taken from you and used for harm, even though it might not be intentional I mean, they're ultimately just trying to make money shows us I don't know what. What can happen when so much of our lives are online and when there's there are no guardrails about how that information can be used.

0:44:49 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, joe. I want to thank you so much for taking the time A to to write this piece, to do this research, but also for joining us. If people would like to kind of keep up with the work that you're doing, are there places they should go to stay up to date?

0:45:06 - Joe Supan
Yeah, just cnetcom.

0:45:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you can check, I generally write about internet so you can check out all my work on there. Awesome, thank you so much. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Bye, all right, have a good day.

All righty, folks, we are going to move along now to my next story that I want to tell you about, and this is really interesting, because we have just heard about Perplexity working on a browser offering, and apparently there's another company working on a browser offering. The AI search wars are moving from the results page to your desktop. Perplexity has launched an AI-first browser called Comet, which integrates its assistant across every part of the browsing experience. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly working on a Chromium-based browser of its own, a move that would put it in direct competition with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and, to some extent, apple's Safari. Both companies are betting on a future where your browser doesn't just display websites it reads, interprets, summarizes and acts on them for you. So let's start by talking about Perplexity's Comet, because it's actually announced and real. It's the AI browser that wants to do it all. Comet replaces the traditional address bar with an AI chat box that is powered by Perplexity's assistant, so with that, you're able to search the web, you can summarize articles or other content. You can draft emails using it, you can manage your calendar and you can navigate sites automatically.

According to Perplexity's CEO, it's to create a browser that functions more like an operating system than a passive viewer. The CEO said this is our bet on building an OS. Now, this I find interesting in and of itself because we have seen, to a certain extent, companies attempt to integrate better with the operating systems that we have. So, of course, on Microsoft's side, you have Windows, on Apple's side, you have macOS, and we've seen, you know, ChatGPT app, we've seen some of these others create apps to try to integrate, but it's come down to those platforms being, I think, a little more locked down. In the case of Microsoft, with it having its own AI system with Copilot so deeply integrated, it's hard to compete in that space and to get into that space. But I think for many of us, we do spend a lot of our time in the browser and that is a more open area for these companies to hop in and sort of latch on with their tech. So, where you have that block of getting to the base system level, if people are mostly using their browsers and you can just give them a browser that they can use. It is, in some ways, equivalent to building an operating system, and I think in that way, it's a very clever means of gaining access to more of the user's information and data. For the sake of being able to give these features, users are prompted to connect their Google accounts, which will allow the assistant to read Gmail and Google Calendar, and in doing so, it can act on those and provide you know changes to your calendar or give you summaries of your upcoming day. Now, according to Reuters, Reuters, crystal Hu, anna Tong and Kenrick Kai summarizing articles directly within the browser. And like Comet, the browser will reportedly be built atop Chromium and expected to integrate tightly with ChatGPT and OpenAI's ecosystem. The browser will leverage OpenAI's agent-like AI model and perform those features on behalf of the user. Now, according to this piece, OpenAI has reportedly hired several engineers who originally helped build Google Chrome, so you can imagine that in this way, it is a much better created and better integrated system.

We've seen a few other companies out there try to create browsers that just can't compete against Chrome, in particular, but to a lesser extent, some of the other browser offerings like Safari and Microsoft's own Edge offerings like Safari and Microsoft's own Edge. Both companies seem to be trying to displace Google as the default way people access information. Many of us not myself, I use Safari, but many of us use Google Chrome as their web browser of choice. And what's interesting is the way that these browsers are going to kind of work on search. Instead of indexing and ranking pages, these browsers aim to interpret and act on content, directly, positioning the AI as the interface and not just the tool. By controlling the browser, open AI and perplexity could collect and this is the big thing richer behavioral data and more tightly integrate AI into everyday tasks. So there's the concern right that in creating these browsers and getting more behavioral data, if that's used for training, that's a little bit more information than perhaps we've given these companies in the past, as they have worked on bringing AI to us and AI tools to us. It wants to challenge Google's dominance, but also, I think, take a little bit of a playbook out, or a page out of Google's playbook, which is to provide access to information so that you can learn what people are interested in and how they go about doing it.

Comet's deep access to user data, having access to Gmail, to Google Calendar, apis. That may set a precedent for how these other AI browsers will work. It makes sense other AI browsers will work. It makes sense. We've seen, to a certain extent, amazon do this with its digital assistant, not as AI as it could be, but still having access to our calendars for the sake of being able to tell us about what is going on. And, of course, OpenAI hasn't yet revealed given that this browser is still just rumored to be coming out its data collection practices for the browser, but that, of course, has already come up with Comet.

Ai-first browsers are kind of a fundamental shift where you don't just have the tab that has the AI system in it and you access it that way, but instead working as the viewport into the vast internet. Right, and we know that Google is increasingly under pressure, not just from competing search tools, but from rivals who, at this point, are saying don't use Google search, we can help you find things better. We've got a better means of searching the web and providing you information. Not to mention, google also is under the spotlight of many regulator and, in that way, needing to allow for competition in the space is something that Google is having to bear in mind. So whether users are going to hand over more control to AI assistance, especially ones that are fully embedded into the browser. That seems to be the next place. We'll be looking, as these new browsers hit and people give them a go, and see if there's an improvement when the AI agent is more deeply integrated into what you're doing. That's something that I've wanted from Apple, in particular, for a while, something that I think has been, for the most part, a success on Microsoft's front. When you have that deeper integration and you're not having to do the heavy lifting of bringing the context with you to an AI chatbot and saying, okay, here's exactly what I'm dealing with, here's what it looks like, here's what I want to do, do that gets complicated. If it can see what you're doing and let you interact by simply asking a question instead of having to provide all that context, it's already a much more powerful system. So it's perhaps a win-win with the understanding that more data may be shared with these companies than we've given them in the past. So Comet available, OpenAI's browser, perhaps coming soon. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly.

The show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you'd like to get all of our shows ad-free, just the content well, we've got a way for you to do that. It's called Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. When you join the club, we'd love to have you as part of the club. We've got monthly and yearly plans and when you join you gain access to all of our shows, all of our content, ad free. You gain access to our Twit+ feeds. There's the Twit+ news events feed. So that's going to have our coverage of different tech news events that take place, like WWDC, for example. Bits and clips, so behind the scenes, before the show, after the show, stuff will be there. And the third feed, which is a feed of our Club Twitch shows, like Mikah's Crafting Corner that's me and some of our other great shows, book clubs, etc. That are available in the club. With that you also get a little key that you can unlock our Discord.

It's a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit, and we would love to see you there. Every time someone new joins they are sort of shown on the welcome page and I love going in there and going oh my goodness, look. Oh, ooh, ooh, ooh. So more and more of you are joining. We love that. Thank you for being a member of Club Twit and, yeah, twit.tv/clubtwit if you're not yet one. If you would like to follow me online, I'm at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua,coffee. That's C got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows, which some of them will publish today iOS Today and Hands on Apple published today and every Sunday. You can check out Hands on Tech as well. Thank you so much for being here and I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye-bye!

0:57:01 - Leo Laporte
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