Tech News Weekly 422 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.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jake Ward is here and Jake talks about how he has been studying the way that big tech has its eyes set on your children. After that, I talk about scientists using AI to identify dinosaur footprints. Yes, a cool use of AI. Dan Moren from Six Colors stops by to tell us about Apple Creator Studio. And Emma Roth joins us to give us the latest on the TikTok US operation. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:38]:
This is Tech News Weekly, Episode 422 with Jake Ward and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, January 29, 2026: Oracle's TikTok Takeover Starts Wwith Outage. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and well, breaking that tech news. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent. And today on this, the final Thursday of the month, I am joined by the wonderful dulcet tones of Jake Ward. Welcome, Jake.

Jacob Ward [00:01:11]:
Hello, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:13]:
How are we doing? Oh, asmr. A little bit there.

Jacob Ward [00:01:16]:
Yeah, exactly. Who wants to hear me rub my beard here? Yeah. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. How's it going?

Mikah Sargent [00:01:22]:
It's good to see you as well. Yes. So as people probably know by this point, if you don't, then welcome to the show for the first time. We are kicking the show off by talking about our stories of the week. These are the things that have stuck out to us that we find interesting that we want to share with all of you. So I will let you take it away, Jake Ward, because all I know is it's something about big tech and something about children.

Jacob Ward [00:01:43]:
Yes, big tech and children. So I, for a long time have been anticipating this month, January of 2026, because we knew that this month a of court cases were going to get smashed together and begin to go to trial in various civil lawsuits filed against the big social media companies, that is YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snap and TikTok. And they are being in some cases kind of mashed together. In some cases the a judge is hearing multiple cases kind of at once to determine some procedural questions. But what I have been looking forward to all of this time is, is the discovery, the, the documents that were going to come out as part of this. And I, I argue basically on every podcast I appear that we can't push back against the difficult effects of big tech on our attention, on our agency, on our kids individually. Being a good parent's not going to be enough. Setting screen time limits is not going to be enough.

Jacob Ward [00:02:50]:
This is a problem at scale and it's going to have to be fought at scale. Argument has always been we're going to have to sue essentially. And part of why I want that is not because I'm interested in the financial penalties that these companies might face or the fact that they might be found to have violated child Child Online Protection act, but because it makes it possible to understand behavioral harm as a new category of legal harm. So we can talk about that more in a second, but let me talk about first what is what has been revealed so far. So these unsealed court documents are a sort of a peek inside the thinking of these companies. The internal discussions in these companies between 2016 and like 2023 most recently. And important to note here, TikTok and Snap have both settled. They've now settled.

Jacob Ward [00:03:39]:
So they are out. Although we do have a lot of their documents and that's interesting to look at. So that leaves YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. And getting into the conversation like, like understanding what these things, what the, how these companies are thinking about kids and thinking about families is a really interesting insight. And so there's an email, one of the early emails is one from 2016 between a couple of executives at Facebook and they say, quote, mark has decided, Mark Zuckerberg, that the top priority for the company in this quarter of 2017 is teens. And that quote, our overall company goal is total teen time spent. Okay, wow. Right.

Jacob Ward [00:04:19]:
Just like. And now, now Facebook has a meta, has a whole site they've put up to kind of say to, to try to push back on the public perception and on the lawsuit. And they say this is stuff that's been taken out of context. We are always working to improve trying to child safety and family safety. We have these industry leading tools. You know, they've put up a lot of, they're pushing back, they're saying this is cherry picked stuff, but there's a lot of cherries to pick. It goes on and on. Right.

Jacob Ward [00:04:44]:
So, so another example at YouTube there was a presentation business case for kids and families at Google and it includes a slide that is headed Solving kids is a massive opportunity. I mean if you can imagine having to write those words at your job, right? And in which it reads that quote, family and kid users have higher engagement and are more likely to be buyers and that quote, families lead to better retention and more overall value. Over at Snap they talk about the sort of wellness perception problem and they think of it more as a problem, not as a sort of wellness issue that needs to be Solved, but as a perception issue that needs to be solved in these documents, which is, you know, a thing. So all of that is sort of articulating like the business value of kids. And that's a really big deal, right? Then the other big theme in these documents is that these companies knew that all kinds of harms were coming across to kids on their platforms for years and years and years and years, clearly. And so there's a TikTok strategy document that points out, quote, TikTok is particularly popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self regulate effectively. An undated YouTube slide deck points out that quote, negative well being effects can result from user behaviors and openly lists late night use, heavy habitual use, unintentional use and problematic content as the, as the root of the majority of negative effects. And then there's a really damning one from, from Instagram, it's an internal newsletter that's circulated among researchers that points out that, quote, teens weaponize Instagram features to torment each other, often without violating standards.

Jacob Ward [00:06:25]:
And so why, why I care again is it's not the short term, like aha, gotcha kind of thing that we're seeing. It's that we in the United States, we only really prosecute like death and theft. Like we care about property, we care about physical harm. We don't traditionally like to think about behavioral harm. We like to think, say that people are in charge of their own behavior and their own choices. You know what I mean? And, and we, we like to blame the addict, right? We're just not a culture that really thinks about systemic influence on people's choices. And this is the ultimate systemic influence on people's choices, social media. And, and what's really interesting is that it is the, the legal theories being drawn on in these lawsuits hearken back to the last time of a big society.

Jacob Ward [00:07:11]:
Changing technology changed people's decision making in a way that was unhealthy for them and that is nicotine. So the legal theories are all based on the big tobacco lawsuits which have to do with these companies knew they moved this addictive thing anyway. They engineered the product to be maximally addictive, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it's that legal theory that's being tossed here.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:34]:
So fascinating.

Jacob Ward [00:07:35]:
And if that, if that works, right, if they win, that's going to create a precedent where you aren't going to be okay saying, well, people are going to do what they're going to do online line. Instead you're Going to be in a position where if you are shown to have taken advantage. And I would say that the AI companies are going to be watching this stuff closely as they deal with all of this AI psychosis stuff and kids falling in love with the chatbots and all that stuff. That's going to be a big legal precedent that will be a danger to their business model going future. So it's a, it's a big, for me it's a big historical moment depending on sort of what happens in these, in these cases.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:09]:
Holy cow. Now I, I feel like I need to read five books, books on how we were able to circumvent the autonomy mind of the, the collective autonomy mind of the US sort of autonomy based values of the US in order to push through the. What we did with, with tobacco, with nicotine.

Jacob Ward [00:08:33]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:33]:
Because yeah, when you think about it, there's no reason really why that should have worked in the way that it did and that we can have all of those little labels on stuff because yeah. How is it to just the sort of base identity of someone who is an American then like autonomy is so at the heart of that. And so the idea that, you know, you going and typing into a chat bot or whatever, you know, opening up your phone. Yeah, because I even think about, we've, you know, we've done episodes of iOS today, another show that I do about screen time and other sorts of well being methods and cutting back on. And there's always some pushback on that where you'll see people going how about just have self control? How about just control yourself? You know what I mean?

Dan Moren [00:09:26]:
I know.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:26]:
And that reminds me of, you know, there's that. That famous lawsuit with the woman who went to McDonald's and ordered the coffee and the coffee was hot.

Jacob Ward [00:09:40]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:40]:
And you come to find out that essentially big, big industries, particularly food industries, but technically like all sorts of companies that sell products or somehow interact with consumers, sort of worked together with a law firm to socially change the way that we look at lawsuits and make that story that it was a dumb person who had a frivolous lawless lawsuit.

Jacob Ward [00:10:12]:
There it is.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:13]:
Yeah. And it ended up hear the true details of the story. You're. I think that just about anybody would be on her side. And so then I remember the first.

Jacob Ward [00:10:22]:
Time because it turns out that it turns out that the, that the fast food industry vacuum seals that liquid at an incredible temperature because it's.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:30]:
Yeah, the temperature is ridiculous.

Jacob Ward [00:10:31]:
It's crazy.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:32]:
So she almost died. It wasn't just a little spill on herself. She almost died all she wanted. Yeah. So go look that up. We don't have time for it. Everybody who's listening, go look it up. Because what I'm getting at, though, is what I remember telling some people about the, you know, the truth of that story and saying, so you know how you were just saying, oh, God, everybody sues for everything these days.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:55]:
I was able to say to them and sort of like, inoculate, because I said that refrain that you've just put out was engineered to make you feel that way. What you are saying is because these lawsuit or the law firms have done their job and you're being, like, controlled in believing that that's the case. And that was immediately like a what? So anyway, it's all very fascinating.

Jacob Ward [00:11:21]:
It is. It's really fascinating. So in this case, I just think this is a really interesting moment in the history of tech and in thinking about, you know, are we truly in charge of ourselves in this stuff? Because we don't, you know, you don't, you don't blame, you know, somebody for having a peanut allergy.

Dan Moren [00:11:39]:
Right.

Jacob Ward [00:11:39]:
You should have more. You should be, you know, you should just toughen up and, and be okay with peanuts. Turns out some people can't eat peanuts, right?

Dan Moren [00:11:45]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:45]:
Or like a diabetic.

Jacob Ward [00:11:47]:
Yeah, diabetic. Who is supposed to, what, tough their way through sugar? That's right. In this case, what we're talking about here is a substrate of influence that lots and lots and lots of people, it turns out, don't have any resistance to. And it's only seeing those people through the eyes of the company that's going to teach us how much and how manipulative, how much they know and how manipulative they can be. And so I just. It's just a good. It's going to be a real, you know, whistleblowers, journalists. We've tried to open up the, the books on these companies for a long time.

Jacob Ward [00:12:18]:
It's discovery that's going to make it happen. And so I'm really curious to see where this goes.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:22]:
Absolutely.

Jacob Ward [00:12:23]:
So that's mine, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:24]:
We'll be keeping an eye on that. But let's take a quick break so I can tell you about our sponsor this week. It's Zscaler, bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Zscaler is the world's largest cloud security platform. The potential rewards of AI look, we've talked about it a lot, and I'm sure that at your companies, you're hearing that they're too great to ignore. But here's the problem. The risks are also too great to ignore. Loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI Generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:54]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:13:55]:
With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt Gen AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust Architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com/security. That zscaler.com/security. All right, we are back from the break and it is time to talk about something I think a little fun. Dino Footprints A team of international researchers has developed an AI powered tool that could change how paleontologists identify the makers of dinosaur footprints. It's a task that has long been complicated due to bias, of course, erosion, and frankly, just the sheer passage of hundreds of millions of years. The study, which is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes from researchers at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin and the University of Edinburgh. Led by Gregor Hartman, the team created an app called Dyno Tracker that uses unsupervised machine learning crucially unsupervised, to analyze footprint shapes without any preconceived notions about which dinosaur made them, and in doing so may have stumbled onto evidence that birds evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we originally thought. So let's dig in.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:19]:
Right? Here's the problem that I've learned comes with identifying ancient footprints. Had no idea. And frankly, I tried to avoid feet and footprints at all Costs. But some scientists are freaks like that. Anyway, matching a fossilized footprint to its maker is surprisingly difficult, it turns out, because these impressions are very, very old. They're preserved in rock layers. Things have shifted. And unless you've got like a full on skeleton that's been fossilized, you don't really know off the top what species has left a print.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:52]:
Now, the way that this would work in its original traditional approach would be human experts who go, yeah, I feel like, yeah, that sort of size, the shape, this, that all. Yeah, it's, it's giving. And then they would say, what, what, what dinosaur they think it is? But this is the problem. As objective as scientists want to believe they are, there is subjectivity in this and scientists don't always agree on these identifications. And then personal biases will end up creeping into the process. So there's actually been some previous attempts to use machine learning, but unfortunately, of course, it require required researchers to first label the training data as we would be used to. And so the algorithm was looking for theropods versus ornithopods. Yeah, right and right, exactly.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:47]:
You know, those two, which will perpetuate those same human biases. Is it a hot dog? Is it not? Well, what's a hot dog? In this case, we've gone with the unbiased approach. So the researchers were like, how can we do this and get the human uninvolved completely? So I love this. It's called a disentangled variational autoencoder, which I wish I could have on my resume, I wish I was that. But it's a neural network that can identify patterns in data without being told what to look for.

Jacob Ward [00:17:19]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:20]:
What it uses mathematical, unbiased points of view and is supposed to help identify what's what could be this different type of animal. So here's how it worked with this specific system. Nearly 2000 real dinosaur footprint silhouettes were popped in and then millions of simulated versions that recreated natural distortions like compression and shifting edges. And then the algorithm was never told anything about any of the tracks. No labels like bird or theropod or nithopod. All it did was analyze the shapes and then figure out on its own what features matter most.

Jacob Ward [00:17:58]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:58]:
And that is the thing that it was designed to do. It's not trying to find, it's not trying to find which of these is what, but instead look for patterns that are, you know, the same across these different variants. And they were able to do that. I want to talk about what features ended up being the features But, Jake, when we were talking about this leading up to it, one of the things you pointed out is we, I feel, and I, you know, I like that we do this, do talk a lot about the harms and the concerns of AI, but one place that I've always looked to for cool AI is the science space.

Jacob Ward [00:18:38]:
That's right. That's right. So, yeah, yeah, I feel that same way. I mean, I look at this and I'm like, man, like, this is, you know, unsupervised learning is the kind of thing you would use. Like at TikTok, right? They don't know, you know, from one video to the next what you're gonna, like in any kind of explainable way. They just like, randomly look, you know, they look for like 200 or so variables and, you know, and it could be like the color palette or, you know, whatever. Like, you know, they don't know what the, what the clusters are going to be. That is another form of unsupervised learning.

Jacob Ward [00:19:07]:
So you can take that same technology and you can use it to, like, make me stay up until 2 in the morning, right? Or you can take that same technology and, and freaking figure out which dinosaur was where and at what time in history. Like, you know, I just think my whole theory about AI for so long has been like, just give it to the scientists. Let's do like five years where you get the foundational scientists, they get all the compute, they get all the horsepower. Let them do that for a while. Let's not make AI girlfriends for a little while and instead just go, hit, you know, space hard. Let's hit cancer hard. You know, I talked to a scientist one time, he was actually an art historian who was saying that his fondest wish was to have all the compute in the world so he could feed everything from major museum collections in, so that they could map the relationships between, like, you know, one kind of pottery and another kind of pottery so they could see, okay, what. What would be missing in between, where would we maybe find it, you know, that kind of stuff.

Jacob Ward [00:20:05]:
I just think there's so much Indiana Jones stuff you could do with this that would be so awesome. So I love, I love, I love this. I don't totally understand how they go from unsupervised learning where you're saying, like, okay, this one's a sauropod, this one's a, you know, whatever orthopod. Like. Like, at some point a scientist has to come in, I assume, and say, okay, you've got these seven groups. You've given me here.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:27]:
Yes.

Jacob Ward [00:20:27]:
These three toed ones are clearly this and this. I mean somebody gets in at some point to do that, but that's.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:32]:
Yeah. So that's, that's yeah, perfect. This is the next step. This is what's really cool about it is if, if, if you just give a bunch of shapes essentially and tell the, or have the AI calculate on it, what it's ending up doing is looking for patterns across those shapes, then a human being can come in and go, okay, quite literally the AI has identified these features that are the same across all of these, these shapes. And when I look at those specific features. Whoa. Like if I look at those specific features and I look for similarities between them and take those shapes and put them together, turns out that just by the nature of the pattern recognition that took place, it's automatically grouping these according to what kind of dinosaur it is.

Jacob Ward [00:21:24]:
So they look without even knowing, even though the system doesn't know anything about dinosaurs.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:28]:
Correct. Yeah, it doesn't know anything about dinosaurs. It's just looking for what is the same between these things and that's it. And so it was 50 possible characteristics that you, that the, it was sort of, you know, sorted for. The neural network identified eight features that most differentiate dinosaur tracks from one another. So again for, for the AI, it was just that differentiate shapes from one another. But of course we know them to be dinosaur tracks. So first and foremost of the eight key features, one was overall load and shape.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:00]:
So the amount of ground contact area. And turns out that was actually the most important distinguishing feature that set things apart more than anything else.

Jacob Ward [00:22:10]:
Which is so cool because again, you, you don't, you don't, you know, the system doesn't know anything about the weight of dinosaurs or what, how many pounds need you need to displace, blah, blah, blah. But you can just work backwards from this is the result.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:21]:
Yes.

Jacob Ward [00:22:22]:
Incredibly deep footprint. And backwards from that you can, you, you can have a system that's consistent enough that the system can, can tell, can give you what you need as a human to be like, oh, right, that would be a big heavy dinosaur with this kind of.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:35]:
Yes. Instead of like. Yeah, instead of looking at it and it almost, it un. You still need the human to do the frankly subjective part. But now the subjectivity is based on what feels like a more reliable pattern.

Jacob Ward [00:22:54]:
Yeah, it's like manageable for human perception and human expertise in a way that it can't be when you just look at like 10,000 pictures of footprints.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:02]:
That's right, absolutely. Yeah. And it's also, I think then it's, it feels less like it's a gut thing and more, you know, sort of. Yeah, sort of grounded.

Jacob Ward [00:23:10]:
I love this too because it's, it's both incredibly cool and helps us remember what AI can do and what it cannot do in a way that I find really helpful. So I think that's a very cool story.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:21]:
Yeah. So there's, there's a lot more in terms of, of the features. I want people to go and check this out. One thing I'll say just to, to kind of round things out with it. There was an interesting thing about birds that they figured out using the dino tracker system. The researchers analyzed some controversial footprints from the late Triassic and early Jurassic periods. And these tracks have long puzzled paleontologists because they look remarkably bird like, even though they predate the oldest known bird skeletons by roughly 60 million years.

Jacob Ward [00:23:55]:
That's awesome.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:56]:
The AI found that these problematic tracks grouped more closely with modern and fossil birds than with any other dinosau type. So it is possible that birds may have originated tens of millions of years earlier than the fossil record currently suggests. Wow. We don't know for sure.

Jacob Ward [00:24:13]:
I love this. I love this. That's so cool. Great use of AI. Thanks, Mike.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:17]:
Absolutely. Well, Jake Ward, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. If people would like to keep up with what you are doing, where should they go to do so?

Jacob Ward [00:24:25]:
You can read a lot more. You can see a lot of those documents we were talking about earlier in the show@the rip current.com. that's the podcast and newsletter that I run. And Mikah, thanks so much for having me, man.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:33]:
Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. I always appreciate it.

Jacob Ward [00:24:35]:
See ya.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:36]:
Alrighty folks, let's take a quick break before we come back with my first of two stories of the week. I want to remind you about Club Twit. Club Twit wants you at Twit TV. Club Twit, you can join the club. $10 a month, $120 a year. When you join the club, you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. First and foremost, you get all of our shows ad free. Just the content, none of the ads, just the good stuff.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:59]:
Stuff. You also gain access to our special feeds. So you will have custom feeds made just for you that include a feed of our sort of special Club Twit or special bits and clips and moments from the show. There's another feed that has our live coverage of tech news events and a third feed if you can believe it. That has our special Club Twit events, my crafting corner, the recent D&D campaign that I ran. We also have Stacy's Book Club plus so much more. All of that is available to you via the Club Twit feeds. Lastly, you gain access to our members only Discord.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:40]:
A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at TWiT. If all of that sounds good to you, well, I told you how to get there. twit.tv/clubtwit to sign up. We're always running different promotions. You know you can get some, some free, a free trial to kind of kick things off and see if it's for you. I love going literally every day to the welcome channel in the Discord and seeing new people joining. So let's see. Shout out to Oren, Myla, shout out to Dandelion.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:09]:
What a great nickname. Shout out to Michael and to Red Panda Detective for joining the club. We appreciate you for taking the time to be with us and yeah, I hope to see more of you in the club. It would be awesome to get to hang out with you. So twit.tv/clubtwit or you can use the little QR code in the top corner of the screen. I'm not going to say left or right because it's going to depend on how you're looking at it. So check it out. Apple just launched Apple Creator Studio, a new subscription bundle that brings Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and the newly acquired Pixelmator Pro together under one roof.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:50]:
Along with AI powered features and premium content for keynote pages and numbers, it's being positioned as the ultimate toolkit for creators on Mac and iPad. But the decision to bundle professional creative apps with productivity software has sparked some debate. Joining us today to talk about it is Six Color Zone. Dan Moren. Welcome back to the show. Dan.

Dan Moren [00:27:11]:
Great to be here as always, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:13]:
So let's kick things off. I'm curious. Apple Creator Studio launched, it's a subscription bundle. We talk about how it has fcp, logic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Can you kind of give us the lay of the land here and explain what Apple is offering with this new subscription?

Dan Moren [00:27:28]:
Yeah, I mean for Apple, this is a one stop shop. That is basically all the creative tools it envisions anybody will need. Now I guess that raises the question of does any creator need all of these tools? But that's part of the virtue of having these things in a bundle. So for the low, low price of $12.99 a month or $129 a year. You're going to get yourself, as mentioned, video editing like Final Cut Pro, along with attendant utilities like Compressor and Motion. You're going to get yourself Logic Pro, which is their audio editing solution, as well as Mainstage, which is sort of a live. In addition to do live programming with audio, you get pixelmayor Pro for images. And then we've also tossed in a bunch of these productivity features as well, as you mentioned.

Dan Moren [00:28:11]:
We'll talk a little bit about that later. But one of the virtues of this is that it is available across many of Apple's platforms. I think pretty much all of them are available on both Mac and iPad. Some of them are also available on iPhone, Vision, OS, etc. So for Apple, this is another attempt to bundle together a lot of its software that it kind of sees as having a common audience and make it very easy for people to start subscribing and have access to all of these things, no matter which devices they're using them on.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:40]:
So Jason Snell publishing over on Six Colors for whatever reason. No, I'm kidding. Jason's. For people who are not hip to the joke there, Jason and Dan both work at Six Colors. Now, the review calls this a bittersweet bundle. And you know, obviously that phrase kind of sticks out to me. I imagine it sticks out to other people. Let's start with the suite.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:04]:
What is the sweet part of this deal for creators who have already invested in Apple's ecosystem and, you know, especially for those of us maybe who've purchased some of these tools ahead of time. Are we enticed?

Dan Moren [00:29:18]:
Good question. I mean, I think this is part and parcel of a shift in terms of the way that we use our software, especially these professional, creative pieces of software. We've already seen bundles from competitors like Adobe. You've got affinity over there on the other side. What the sweet part of this I think is, is that it is a very attractive price. $13 a month. Month for all of this software is probably a lot cheaper than most people are paying. Right? You're used to these software costing several hundred dollars for the most part.

Dan Moren [00:29:50]:
Plus if you are buying like multiple things here, like if you were paying several hundred dollars, 300 bucks or so for Final Cut Pro, and then you also want Motion and compressor. Those are 50 bucks each. Now you're talking 400. So even at a subscription price of $129, it's going to take a few years before you match up to that price price. And you were Getting all these other apps as a bonus. Now there's some attraction to that because there's also the ability for you to turn on this subscription and turn it off as needed. So if you only find yourself needing one of these tools on occasion, you can subscribe for 13 bucks, get it for a month, then cancel your subscription, and you are free and clear. So you don't have to pay 300, even if you're like, oh, I only really want to make, you know, one movie or one audio production or what have you.

Dan Moren [00:30:36]:
So there is an advantage to that aspect in terms of the way they're structuring the purchases. I think there's also the, the cross platform aspect of it that we discussed earlier. If you got one of these tools maybe on the Mac, but you weren't using it on your iPad, now you have the ability to do that kind of as part of the whole, the whole bundle. And there's also more incentive for Apple sort of long term to continue to update these apps. It certainly did a good job of updating, you know, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro over the long term. But some of those apps can remain a little stagnant if people are only buying them every several years or buying them and then not buying a new version. Right. You know that 300 is great up front, you own it.

Dan Moren [00:31:17]:
But there's less incentive for the company to keep improving it if you've already, you know, shelled out your money. And it's also frustrating if you're somebody who then, you know, down the road has to, you know, pony up another 300 to upgrade to the latest version, depending on how they want to structure their upgrade pricing. So, so there are some advantages to this subscription pricing and this bundling of all these apps.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:37]:
Let's talk about the bitter. What are some of the concerns? Criticisms about the structure of the offering and perhaps any of the changes that have taken place therein.

Dan Moren [00:31:50]:
Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is it's also an all in one thing, right. If you just want Final Cut or you just want to want Logic, this could potentially be more than you want. Right. Like for the moment, the standalone apps are still available on the Mac for their classic pricing. Unclear how long that will remain the case. But if you want Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro or pixelmator Pro on the Mac, you can go buy those as a standalone purchase for now. But if you're somebody who's new to this, you know, there is also the argument like, well, I want these tools, but now I'm paying Forever, right? You know, I'm never gonna stop paying my 13amonth because I need access to these tools as opposed to something that you nominally buy and kind of forget it, even if it keeps working for your purposes. Right? I'm somebody who uses Logic Pro for podcasting, and it's not to say that there aren't plenty of updates to Logic, but for my needs, my current version of Logic might be just fine.

Dan Moren [00:32:41]:
And that'll be great as long as it keeps working. If it eventually gets put out to pasture, I have to contend with that aspect of it. But a lot of the criticism about this has revolved around these inclusion of productivity apps, in part because it feels like there's sort of just a mismatch in terms of the utility of the them. You know, okay, you might be editing video and also need to edit audio or also need to do image work, but you also need to do spreadsheets and fill out word processing. And also those apps were free and are still free, but the bundle gives you access to specific features that are not otherwise available. So if you are somebody who is just using Pages or Keynote or Numbers and wants the extra features available thereof, you have no choice but to subscribe and get all these other apps, which is fine, but maybe that's not the value proposition you're looking for. So it's kind of a one size fits all approach, which is one of the problems. Like, it might work for a lot of people, but there are also always going to be edge cases of people who are like, I just want this one thing.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:42]:
Let's talk about one of the sort of newer additions, pixelmator Pro, available on iPad for the first time as part of the bundle. If someone's kind of been using it on the Mac up to this point, or. Or perhaps is just kind of new to it in general. What does the iPad version bring to the table? Or what does pixelmator Pro bring to the table? Especially in comparison to Apple's current and previous offerings in the space of photo editing.

Dan Moren [00:34:09]:
Sure, yeah. I mean, Apple's current offerings in the space of photo editing are pretty limited, right? I mean, the Photos app has a bunch of tools built into it, but it's always been one of those tricky things where it's an app that's predominantly about cataloging and being able to store your photos. Photos it's less about. I want to get in, really do nitty gritty edits on these things. Pixelmator Pro allows them to have a competitor to Photoshop, and that is a powerful Thing because Apple's never really had that before. And there's a few different things that are new here. One, I mean Apple talked up this new warp tool. You know, that's, that's great.

Dan Moren [00:34:44]:
It's a handy tool to let you like twist and bend images and stuff like that. That's great. But it's, it's just one feature. I think the bigger attraction for having this on the iPad is full integration with the Apple pencil. So you have a lot of people who maybe were doing work on the Mac, but the ability to then open up a tablet and have a pencil with which they can do all their edits and their interface and all of that, you know, designed to be best in class, I think that is very powerful because obviously that's a huge use case for the iPad. And then to sort of add on to that the ability to round trip files, to be able to work on a file on your iPad and then go open it up on your Mac. Mac is also incredibly powerful because it means your workflow can go with you whichever device you're working on. So I think that's the part that's going to be the most appealing to people who are sort of coming into this for the first time is the ability to have this on the iPad and also, you know, like go back and forth between their Mac and use the pencil and have a different way of manipulating images.

Dan Moren [00:35:39]:
So I think that's all, you know, a great opportunity for Apple to really go into a space that maybe it's, it's been a little bit lackluster into date.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:46]:
Let's talk about the AI of it. All these AI features across the apps, Transcripts in transcript search rather in Final Cut Pro, Chord ID and Logic Image generation. How well so far do these AI integrations work in practice?

Dan Moren [00:36:04]:
Yeah, I think it's variable across the line in what you're doing. Some of these are much more traditional Apple quote unquote AI tools in the sense that they are using machine learning techniques that are not generative AI, but are things that allowed you to unlock the potential of these, you know, machine learning algorithms. So for example with transcript search, the ability to find a clip in your Final cut library where somebody said something in particular rather than having to painstakingly go through every single clip and edit it or you know, audition it and look at, okay, was this where they said this quote? And then even more than that, it's able to actually identify things that happen in the footage in the same way that you can go to your photos library on your iPhone or your Mac and search, search for person in a red shirt or something like that. Right. And it'll find that. Because machine learning algorithms let you find based on content. So that's really powerful. And I think that's.

Dan Moren [00:36:52]:
That probably works pretty well. That's technology we've been using, as I said, in other places for some time. Similarly, things like Chord id, as you said, which helps detect the chords in a song, in logic, like these are things that are very good applied, very narrow uses of these machine learning algorithms, algorithms to do a specific task. So I think those seem to be getting much better sort of reviews. When you start adding in the, the generative AI aspects, which of course is a place where Apple has struggled, things get a little dicier. A lot of this stuff seems to be provided by their integration with ChatGPT, which is something that they've been offering in image playgrounds for a little while now. I don't know that those things are necessarily much better than they've been in the past. Certainly using chapter GPT as opposed to their own models will make things, in theory, more competent.

Dan Moren [00:37:40]:
But, you know, at the same time, I think your mileage varies with those generative tools.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:46]:
Absolutely. The decision to roll the iWork apps into this bundle seems to be the thing that's really raising the eyebrows. Why is it that including. Why is it, like, controversial and what does it signal maybe about Apple's approach to that productivity suite moving forward?

Dan Moren [00:38:02]:
Yeah, I mean, the trick is that with the, the iWork bundle, that was always something seen as a value add for when you buy a Mac, you get a free copy of, you know, pages, numbers, Keynote. Apple's now lumped free foreign in there as well, which is their sort of, you know, brainstorming app. Just throw it in there. So, you know, it wasn't something that was ever really seen, I think, as a, a revenue generation thing on its own. Right. It was a thing that enhanced the value of your computer. It came out of the box with all the, these tools that you might need to write, you know, write word processing documents, create spreadsheets, do presentations. Right.

Dan Moren [00:38:36]:
Your, your Mac is a capable tool. The fact that some of these tools have now have features that are bundled into this is. It's weird, it's challenging. It makes them feel like freemium apps where you get it for free. But asterisk, some stuff is only available if you pay more. It's also, as we mentioned before, kind of bundled in with everything else. Makes it kind of feel like a mismatch because, because they are not really creative, quote unquote tools. And then there's also some nuts and bolts challenges with it.

Dan Moren [00:39:02]:
You know, I opened up, you know, numbers on my laptop yesterday and it's like, oh, this version is, is not going to be updated ever again. You need to go download the new version from the App Store. It's like, but this version still works and it still does what I needed to. Nope, you got to go get this other version. Some of which is limitations of Apple's the, the back end of their store and how those work. But I think it's just mostly making people feel like, okay, there's certain places where that premium content like being able to do templates or themes or stuff like that that is perhaps requires a little additional outlay. Makes sense even from a financial perspective. The AI based features like, okay, those may have charges associated with them.

Dan Moren [00:39:39]:
It costs Apple money potentially if you're doing image generation or using these AI tools. But it does also give people a bad taste in their mouth because it has a bit of a bait and switch feel to it where it's like, oh, I came in with these free tools. Now you're telling me I can only get the latest feature if I also buy all of your creators, you know, creative software as well, which is maybe not something I really need.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:01]:
Lastly, at 1299 per month, $129 per year, although a very steep education discount, how does this stack up against the competition and then ultimately who, who do you think this bundle is really for?

Dan Moren [00:40:16]:
Well, I think it stacks up pretty well. I mean it kind of, of manages to fit in between something like, you know, the Adobe Creative Cloud where that, I mean those things can cost $40 a month, right? Or more. That's really expensive if you want to get yourself, you know, Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere and all that. On the other end of the scale you've got Affinity, which has got its designer and photo and publisher apps which they do use as free and then some stuff on top of that that integrates with it may have an additional cost cost. So this kind of sits in between those two. I don't think it's a bad cost overall. Like I said, like it's, it's providing tools that people really do use and they are very capable tools. I think the real, like as you mentioned, the education discount, I think that's a really smart move on Apple's part because it goes from 13amonth to $3 a month or $30 a year.

Dan Moren [00:41:08]:
And I think there's an aim in there to sort of get in the door with students, with people who are going to be, be the next generation of people working in these fields. And thus we'll get used to having these tools, will eventually become more, you know, paying customers the full price when they get out, but also will just help bring more and more people using these tools into the environment of these industries and make the tools themselves more popular. So I, I think it's, there's a bit of a Trojan horse aspect to it there where they're like, well, we can sneak in the back door by getting the kids, we'll get the kids hooked on our creator studio and then, then they'll be using it forever. So, you know, I think it's also doesn't hurt that there's just a general appeal to saying, you know, people have come in buying a new iPad or a Mac or whatever, and it's like, hey, you want to unlock more powers? We've got all the tools you need, you know, an additional subscription and there you go. You're often running video editing or, or audio editing or doing image editing, whatever you want to do. We've got a tool for you. So it, it kind of makes it feel like even more of a end to end end solution for creators.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:10]:
Makes sense. Well, Dan Morin, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today on the show. Always a pleasure to get to chat with you. If people want to keep up with the work that you're doing, where are the best places for them to go to do so?

Dan Moren [00:42:23]:
Obviously you can go over to 6colors.com where we write all about Apple and cover stuff, including the creator studio and many more things. I also do a couple tech podcasts. You can find me at the rebound or over at Clockwise with Mikah every Wednesday on Relay fm. Check that out too.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:40]:
Thank you, Dan. We'll see you soon.

Dan Moren [00:42:41]:
Thanks.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:42]:
Ahoy there, Mikah here. If you haven't done so yet, now is your last chance to take the 2026 TWiT audience survey. We of course appreciate the feedback we've received thus far. If you haven't yet done it well, you still have time. Now's the time. Head to twit.tv/survey26 today. It closes January 31st. So run, don't walk.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:04]:
Thanks so much. All right, we are back. And that means it's time for my next interview. TikTok's new U.S. operation got off to a rough start just days after an Oracle LED group took over the app's American arm. The solution to its long threatened ban. Users found themselves unable to upload videos, saw therefore you pages seemingly reset, and encountered a range of other errors. Now, the new owners blamed a data center power outage, but the timing kind of sparked speculation about censorship and what this new era of TikTok might look like.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:37]:
Joining us today to talk about it is the Verge's own Emma Roth. Welcome back, Emma.

Emma Roth [00:43:42]:
Hi, thanks for having me.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:43]:
Yeah, so let's kick things off. What exactly happened to TikTok in the US starting early, I believe it was Sunday morning as we record this show on Thursday, January 20th, 9th, and what kinds of problems were users, including I hear those at the Verge, experiencing firsthand.

Emma Roth [00:44:00]:
Right. There was a lot of issues with TikTok shortly after the ownership change took place, and some creators were reporting that they weren't able to upload videos or publish them and their views were stuck at their view count was stuck at zero. So it was almost like their videos weren't getting pushed out. And a lot of people, including some of us at the Verge, were having trouble Loading comments. Logging in. And some of us based in the US were also unable to view videos posted by colleagues in other countries. So it was a very strange bug.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:38]:
Wow, interesting. Okay, so tell us a little bit about TikTok USDs, because it blamed the issues on that power outage, Right? But what do we know about this explanation? And are there still unanswered questions about what caused it? Because that seems to be the big thing, the that USDS came forward with something, but people are still going, but are we sure that's what's up?

Emma Roth [00:45:00]:
Yeah, exactly. I think there's still a lot of speculation about what really went down, but TikTok like came forward and said this is related to a power outage at one of our partners data centers and Oracle, which now owns a chunk of TikTok in the U.S. u.S. They later confirmed that it was indeed at one of their data centers, but we still don't know where this data center was or whether this was related to the massive snowstorm that just hit a large portion of the US So I think there are still some unanswered questions about this and I know once TikTok did get things up and running, they did say they were experiencing like, like other system failures that were causing glitches. But I think mainly things are are getting resolved now.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:51]:
For folks who might not be up to speed, I was hoping you could kind of explain what TikTok USDS is and how the ownership of TikTok's US operations recently changed. So kind of a, a, a prequel to all of this that's happening now.

Emma Roth [00:46:04]:
Yeah, definitely. So to comply with the federal divestor ban law that went into effect last year, TikTok had to sell off off its US operations. And after a very long time of negotiating and delaying this deal, Oracle and a group of investors agreed to purchase parts of TikTok ByteDance, which is TikTok's China based parent company. They still own just a little under 20% of the new TikTok in the US but it is mainly under control of American companies now and the board also is mainly American board members.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:51]:
Okay, so the timing of this outage led to a lot of speculation online particularly around these fears of censorship.

Dan Moren [00:47:00]:
Right.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:00]:
Tied to events like the ICE protests in Minneapolis. Can you tell us about these concerns? Concerns and from what you can tell whether they appear to be founded.

Emma Roth [00:47:10]:
Yeah, I think it seems for now that this looks like kind of just really bad timing for TikTok. I think a lot of people are concerned about Oracle like having a chunk of the brand as it's co founded by Larry Ellison who has some close ties to Trump. And this definitely like sparked some concerns regarding whether this would change the type of content that we see on the platform. But I think like the technical issues coupled with what was happening in the world, it just kind of created the perfect storm of speculation with people. I don't know it just people were accusing it of not like pushing out their videos if they're about a certain topic or not being able to search for certain things things. But I think that this was probably largely related to the, the power outage issues and I think we're definitely going to have to wait and see like in the weeks to come to see if the algorithm is going to change because TikTok US is going to retrain the algorithm on US user data.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:18]:
Now the new terms of service for US users do include some notable changes around data collection and AI interaction. What should users know about what they're agreeing to now? Because if there's one thing I've seen it is post after post after post about Tick Tock is going to have every single possible thing that you could ever post on the it seems really people are worried about it. Is that founded.

Emma Roth [00:48:43]:
Not. I feel like it's a little bit over overplayed because I combed through the terms myself and I did see that a lot of them were the same as they were previously before the new ownership came and the. But the biggest difference is that TikTok will now ask for your permission to track your geolocation, which is a more precise form of location tracking. And. But they did say you can obviously like, turn this off, like, you can opt out of it. So it's not like being forced. But then there was also a new stipulation that says you're going to have to, like, share your AI, your conversations with like AI or your AI prompts with TikTok. So that those are the two big changes.

Emma Roth [00:49:33]:
Everything else has largely remained the same.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:36]:
Understood. By Tuesday, TikTok said it had made significant progress recovering its infrastructure. Can you tell us the current state of the app and are there still lingering issues that people are. Of course there are. I'm sure there are going to be a couple of users. But is it still big enough that the Verge is regularly seeing that people are still having issues?

Emma Roth [00:49:55]:
As of Thursday, yeah, I think the app has like, largely gotten back to normal, but I think, like, there are some, there are still like, some people who are seeing. Maybe they don't see something they usually see on their for you page, but I think it's like the technical difficulties have largely been resolved.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:17]:
That's good to hear. And then lastly, in the wake of all of this, some users have said they're leaving TikTok or moving to other platforms. What is the broader sentiment among creators and users right now about trusting this new version of the app? Is TikTok going to lose its US creators because of the tumult, or will they be sticking around? As far as we can tell, hell, as things stand right now, I think.

Emma Roth [00:50:40]:
Like, what's happening here is, is similar to what we saw with X and take its takeover of Twitter. A lot of people are trying to, are saying they're going to move to a different platform. There are a lot of people bringing up a platform called upscrolled, which is kind of like a mix between X and Instagram, and people are favoring that. But in my opinion, I just, I'm not sure how long these, these trends will last. And like, I'm not sure how soon these people will be coming back to TikTok. But yeah, I do think that people are kind of unsettled by this takeover. And I definitely do believe that some people are switching. I'm just wondering for how long that's gonna last.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:29]:
You'll be back. Thank you for answering that question. You know, I think is one of the most recent wrinkles to all of this. So I was curious to hear how, how you, how you felt about that. So thank you Emma for taking the time to join us today to give us an update on the current state of TikTok and its US arm. If people would like to keep up to date with the great work that you're doing, I know you've got a lot of news to cover. Where should they go to do so?

Emma Roth [00:51:59]:
Yeah, you can follow me at emroth08 on X or Blue Sky.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:04]:
Awesome. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Emma Roth [00:52:07]:
Thank you.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:08]:
Alrighty folks, that brings us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday, Twit TV tnw. That's where you go to subscribe to the show and audio and video formats. I mentioned Club Twit during the show, but I'll just remind you, twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go to sign up $10 a month, $120 per year.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:24]:
So be sure to head there. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee, that's C H I H U A H U A dot Coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows that publish today, including iOS today, hands on Apple and tune in this Sunday for the next set of recordings for Hands on Tech. Thank you you for being here. Thank you for your support of the show. Tell your friends about the show, tell your family about the show, share the show around and I will see you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:02]:
Bye everybody.