AI slop, smart rings and riding the S-curve: The year in tech and what’s ahead

“Never a dull moment” is how Wellington-based veteran consumer tech reviewer and commentator Pat Pilcher describes the year in tech after relentless product launches, an “utterly insane” Black Friday sales season and the “enshitification” of the internet, thanks in large part to AI.

In our final episode of The Business of Tech for 2025, Pilcher joins the show to break down the biggest trends of 2025 and what’s coming in 2026, from AI agents and smart rings to humanoid robots and the debut of solid‑state batteries.​

Apple, AI and the year of the fold

Pilcher starts with the elephant not in the room: Apple’s slow play on generative AI. 

“Every tech player and their pet poodle had an AI offering except Apple,” he said. “This is just crazy. This is a company that sets the trends that everyone slavishly follows, and they missed the bus on the biggest AI trend probably of the decade.” 

Yet he thinks there is method in the apparent madness, arguing that “stepping back… until they get a mature offering” may prove “quite sensible” in such a fast‑moving space.​

That patience, he predicts, will collide with hardware in 2026. Pilcher is convinced 2026 is going to be the year of the iPhone fold, following in the wake of foldables leader Samsung.    

AI slop, deepfakes and the S-curve of tech adoption

AI dominated 2025, working its way along the classic S‑curve of technology adoption. While an enthusiastic user of generative AI tools, Pilcher is blunt about the downsides, from “AI slop” filling Facebook, X and LinkedIn to academics “pulling their hair out” as students outsource learning to chatbot tools.​

With hyper‑realistic video models like Sora3and an election year looming, Pilcher says “the general public needs to be a lot more critical, a lot more sceptical – and they’re not”.

Pilcher chooses Cory Doctorow’s famous term “enshittification” to sum up a key, regressive trend of 2025.

“You subscribe to a service, it sounds fantastic and it’s only $5 a month. Three months later, it’s $25 a month, does less, requires more of your information and they can’t guarantee your privacy and by the way, your password’s been stolen,” he said.

Pilcher sees this as evidence that the business model underpinning AI is dubious, with companies investing “billions and billions of dollars in massive data centres” in a period of “geopolitical instabilities and macroeconomic instabilities”.

Silicon became “the new global currency” in 2025, from Nvidia’s dominance to Google’s Tensor processing units (TPUs) and China’s push to go beyond 40nm (nanometers) under US export bans. 

Smart glasses, smart rings and genuinely smart homes

If 2025 was AI’s year, Pilcher also thinks it was when home and wearable tech quietly levelled up. He rates Meta’s new Ray‑Ban smart glasses, which can describe what you’re looking at and translate signs on command. Future prototypes, he notes, combine wristbands that track “tendon movements” for hand‑gesture interfaces with augmented reality (AR) overlays that could do everything from lie detection in negotiations to live 3D navigation in unfamiliar cities.​

Smart rings are another sleeper hit, with Pilcher praising rings for being “unobtrusive” and “tiny” while monitoring health stats well enough to “tell you proactively when you’re coming down with a cold or a flu a week before you start noticing symptoms”. In his own testing, backed by a blood‑pressure cuff and digital thermometer, a smart ring delivered accurate results.

On the home front, Pilcher says the long‑promised smart home is finally here, thanks to the Matter standard, which means new gadgets “will basically work regardless if you have an Alexa, Apple, Siri or… Google Home”. 

EVs, robots and the 2026 futures

Pilcher also covers the post‑rebate slump in EV sales, the rise of value‑packed Chinese brands like BYD, and the misinformation around EV fire risks, pointing out how a petrol vehicle, not a battery, was to blame in a widely shared bus fire incident. 

Putting his futurist hat on, Pilcher talks about smart contact lenses with built‑in displays and gesture‑tracking bracelets that could make smartphones “look as quaint as a Model T Ford”, always‑on access to AR shopping lists and navigation, and the first serious wave of humanoid robots. 

With cheaper AI silicon and compact models, he “wouldn’t be surprised

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's the final episode for twenty twenty five off the
Business of Tech powered by two Degrees Business, and what
a year it's been. From aislop and humanoid robots to
smart rings, streaming wars, and ev angst. It's felt like
the future finally arrived with all the weirdness that implies.
So to help make sense of it all, this week's

(00:24):
show turns into a bit of a text doc take
for the year that was and a peek into the
year to come. Joining the podcast is someone who's been
watching these Ways of Innovation break for decades, which doctor
co founder, market researcher and consumer tech guru Pat Pilcher.
Pat has been tracking everything from the AI megashift in
Apple's foldable dilemma, to the boom and Chinese evs, the

(00:47):
great streaming backlash, and why home robots and smart homes
finally started becoming useful in twenty twenty five. So we'll
cover all of that, and we'll also look ahead to
the categories about to explode potentially into six from smart
contact lenses and humanoid housekeeper robots to solid state batteries
that could rewrite the rule for evs, wearables, and laptops

(01:10):
Pat's been reviewing tech gear for around thirty years. He's
one of the country's most experienced consumer tech reviewers and journalists.
So I think you'll enjoy this bumper episode of the
Business of Tech. We pack a lot in so pour
something festive your notifications and settle in for a fast
tour through the year in tech with Pat Pilcher here
on the Business of Tech. So, Pat, welcome to the

(01:37):
Business of Tech. How are you doing?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Flash and pretty? It's all good. It's been a really
crazy time actually, there's so many, so many launchers, and
Black Friday of course has been utterly insane. It has
so yeah, yeah, a whole moment.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
And look, we've known each other for probably twenty five years.
You're the biggest tech head I know. Obviously the co
found under an editor of Witch Doctor, which is probably
actually the only outlet consistently covering consumer tech in New
Zealand today.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, there aren't many of us about and the numbers
are shrinking, but yeah, Witch Doctors hanging in there. So yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Music lifestyle, Gary Steele obviously one of the most experienced
music journalists in the country, a massive gear head on
home high five stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, So he's part
of that as well, So go to witchdoctor dot co
dot nz to check out all of that. But you've
married that over the years. Market research really is your background,

(02:38):
right with ABC? Initially?

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I initially started out with IDC.
It was the heart of the tech boom. What a
time to be doing tech tech market research. It was crazy.
But it's sort of been really interesting doing research and
tech because there is a bit of a relationship between
tech journalism and research, because I mean, if you're journalist,
you're doing research of course, and you get to see

(03:00):
a lot of crazy treams happening in the market. And
twenty twenty five has been a year of some pretty
cool trends that are started kicking off.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah, how would you sort of summon up? So it's
just ai everything at the moment, and AI agents really
hit peak in twenty twenty five. But with your yeah,
with your sort of marketing research trends had on and
your love of tech, what are the things that really
stood out for you?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
I tell you what what stood out was who was
absent from the game? I mean you have you know,
you have chat GPT, Microsoft co Pilot, Google's Gemini, which
is of course the big AI claud treanthropic. Every tech
plarer and their pet pedle had an AI offering except Apple,
you know, and this is just crazy. This is a

(03:45):
company that sets the trends that everyone slavishly follows, and
they missed the bus on the biggest AI trend probably
of the decade.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Or did they? Or have they? I mean, are they
been quite clever about about being a late fight in this.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
I think, look that there is a lot to be
said for doing that, because I mean it's such a
fast moving feast at the moment. I mean, you know,
I'm seeing new iterations of AI models and AIS systems
almost every week at the moment, and the capabilities are
just evolving and advancing almost on a daily basis. So
stepping back from that until they get a mature offering

(04:23):
in a way quite sensible. And I mean the iPhone
folders are common and if I was Apple, I keep
my powder dry and slaps MAYI goodness into the iPhone
fold And I think they could set the market on fire.
I mean they've got the resources.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
They do have the resources. They're sitting on a cash
pile that's just vast. They have had a you know,
obviously Apple Intelligence has been a dud and they've admitted
that they've changed out the team. A lot of the
products offerings there have been delayed. Serri Supercharged with its
generative AI is not that flash.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Well, I think the thing is they really you know,
corporate group thing prevailed at the start, and I think
the Siri team got handed this AI think as it
was emerging and they went, ah, we've already got Suri,
you know, and of course Syria is script based. There's
no AI and Surrey at all in that. You could
argue serious is done as a brick really, but so

(05:17):
they got off on the back foot and everyone's gone
past them. But I think they're now looking at that
regrouping and have put some serious work in. So Michael
has watched the space.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Yeah, the iPhone Air, lovely looking device, but has disappointed
when it comes to sales. So people are still going, yeah,
I just want the latest iPhone.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, this is the thing. I think it's a really
skinny phone, you know, it's Apple Gear. It is really
tasty to look at, but you know, it does it
scratched at it for an iPhone user, And I think
the mid range and flagship models are really what people
are spending money on. So who knows. But what struck
me the last couple of years with the iPhones is

(05:58):
they're very samey Samy. There's been a very little real innovation,
and I think that twenty twenty six is probably going
to be the year of the iPhone fold. You know,
Apple really need to jump on the fold bandwagon, and
I'm picking you'll probably get the technology of the iPhone
Air married with a foldable phone to come up with
something comparable to Samsung's Galaxy Fold seven. You know, a
really skinny foldable phone that will just be the same

(06:21):
form factor as a normal slab style phone, but while
unfolded to a mini tablet.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
I reckon the equivalent of the flip, which is more
like the clamshell foldable which Samsung has done up both as.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Date, they're really I mean because they basically really pocketable
and you know, they have become a normal phone when
you flip them open. I mean, I really like them,
and that's one of these categories that I think hasn't
had the love that it deserves.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, they are expensive. Let's go back to AI assistance
because that there's been a lot going on there. We
just saw a couple of weeks ago the debut of
Gemini three, which is getting rave reviews on the benchmarks.
That's doing very well, also performing very well. We've seen
some of those leaked memos from Open Ai. Ei're worried
about Gemini.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
I think they've got a lot to worry about it
at the moment. I mean, the you know, technology tends
to go on what they call the S shaped curve,
and you know at the beginning where at the bottom
of the yes before it slopes up, you get you know,
sort of this this mass sort of promotion and you
start heading into mass market adoption. But it's starting to
mature really fast, and if you're not at that inflection point,

(07:29):
you could find yourself in a bit of trouble. So
who knows, but open Ai definitely there. But I think,
you know, the AI think you're hearing a lot about
what's bad with AI. I mean, you know, there are
some huge downsides. I mean, go on to Facebook, go
on to x go on to LinkedIn, and they're a
wash with AI slop. You know, it's I went on

(07:50):
to a well I won't name them because I probably
get in trouble with lawyers. But I went onto a
very prominent bookstore last night with my reader, trying to
find something decent reader, and all I could find a
box packed with AI slot, you know, really badly written books.
And if you're an academic, I mean friends of mine
who are university professors are just pulling your hair out

(08:12):
because of course kids are resorting to AI. They're not learning,
they're getting AI do the work for them. And I
think the really fascinating story was UK's Channel four and
a documentary called Will AI Take My Job? And this
had this lovely host. She went through the program and explained,
you know, in laypersons speak, what AI was and how

(08:34):
it was going to affect businesses and things. And then
right at the very end, she steps up at the
camera she goes, by the way, I'm not real I
generated and was gone, yeah, you could almost hear the
sound of fourteen million jaws hitting the shad pole collectively.
It was, you know, and this is a thing that
I think people didn't realize with AI. It's the uncanny
value effect is, which is you know where sort of

(08:57):
machines are close to human but not close enough, but
they're creepy. We're sort of getting past that now and
ais can actually pass themselves off as humans in specific settings,
and it's a little scary to watch.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
And I think particularly with saw A three open AI's
video AI generator, and when that exploded onto social media
and for the first time, I was actually seeing videos
of you know, like a line attacking someone, and normally
Facebook is full of.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
These real videos all Smith eating spaghetti. I mean that
I had nightmares for weeks after watching Yeah, but that
one was clearly like weird. But the realism now to
a point and sometimes they have a water mic, but
we are I think you're right past that uncanny valley stage.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
And it's really infuriating when you realize I've just spent
ten seconds looking at something and I've only realized by
reading the comments that it's fake. That's scary.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
It's really scary. And I think the problem is the
general public need to be a lot more critical, a
lot more skeptical, and they're not in.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Our platform, so just running this stuff without prompting.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Or I mean, I've had access to Google's Gemini Vio
video creation model and that thing is astonishing. You know,
I'm generating I generated a little cinematic mini movie off
my Greyhound basically driving a Lamborghini into the Grand Casino
in Monte Carlo, and you know, I describe what he
was doing, what the car looked like, where it was,

(10:29):
the camera positioning, and then twen minutes later I had
this whole collection of clips that I just ended up
with Microsoft clip champ into this little mini movie. It
was basically had some James Bond music and voila, and
it was cinematic and obviously Greyhound Stone drive Lamborghinis. But
other than that, if there'd been a human being not

(10:49):
a dog, you wouldn't have known. You know, it was
literally that good.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
For all the advances, you still have the taels, the
things that give it away, like fingers, it still has
a terrible job of.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
What is it with things and background signs. You know,
they have this weird sort of Sanskrit slash tie. It
doesn't make sense, you know.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, so it can't do it can't inject words, credible
words into an image and three can.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Now this is the thing they reckon Gemini. Three can
And in my early testing year, you know it's I
could put stuff up in social media. I mean, luckily
there's guardrails built in you can't post manipulate public figures
into doing things that would incriminate them or whatever. So
for instance, I kind of have the PM shagging a
sheep or something really that would cause litigation or whatever.

(11:40):
But there is still so much scope, and as we're
in an election year, this is going to become a
really big issue I think.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah. So obviously there's still sort of an experimentation mode
with a lot of these AI assistants, but the business
model underpinning it. We saw Microsoft slapped majorly in Australia
by the Commerce Commissioner over there. They did a big
apology here in New Zealand as well about bundling the
co pilot assistant into an increased subscription for Microsoft three

(12:09):
sixty five. They had their backtracks seriously on that.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Well, this brings me to my next key trend I
noticed in twenty twenty five, and I don't know if
I'm allowed to say this, but inititification.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, you know, and Corey doctor O's theory, and it's happening.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
It's happening right now. I mean, you know, you subscribe
to a service, it sounds fantastic, and it's only five
dollars a month. Three months later, it's twenty five dollars
a month. Does less, requires more of your information and
they can't guarantee your privacy and by the way, your
password has been stolen. It's not good and sort of
you marry that up with AI. It's a little concerning.

(12:42):
So and as I said earlier, we're heading into an
election year. I can just see a few problems on
the way.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah, but the business model isn't quite there underpending these
AI agents, right, I mean the investment that Microsoft, Open Ai,
Google are putting into that is not being returned yet
and it won't be for years.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
But that's the thing. I mean, it's it's got a
very long tail. And you know, we're in an environment
where geopolitical instabilities and macro economic instabilities are at play,
and we have companies investing billions and billions dollars and
massive data centers and Video is doing very nice out
of it. But you know, you saw the panic last
week when Video were announcing your results. You know that

(13:24):
speculation of tech bubble was going to burst. And if
that happens, I dread to think what New Zealand's economy
is going to do. If there is a tech bubble implosion.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Yeah, and we saw the other news a couple of
weeks ago about Google doing a deal potentially with Meta
for its sensor processing units. So they've been quietly building
up their own chip capability to run their own data centers. Yes,
and obviously that's impressing third parties like Meta.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Well, this is the thing. I mean, Silicon is, you know,
such a hot potato now. I mean you just look
at what's happened in China with the you know, the
tech ban on Chinese companies from getting ultra high end
chip fab capabilities. You know, TCMC obviously got shut out
from the Chinese market with certain ship technologies, and China's
had to really work hard to get around that to

(14:13):
go beyond fourteen nanometers. And you know, chips are the
new global currency because you've got to have these data
centers to run AI, to stay in the game, to
keep sheeholders happy, and it's all very circular, could get wobbly,
who knows.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
And the Chinese seem to be doing really well with
their own internal economy. Now for chips, they're not quite
as good on benchmarks as in video, but enough to
do most of what PROTECTAR consumers want, oh for sure.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
I mean, this is the thing. I mean. I wrote
a while back in a witch Doctor about the Trump's
move to ban Wahwei and how Wahwei, if they were smart,
would stick to their guns and innovate. And they have been,
and they're now producing silicone that does rival Western silicon.
They've got their own operating system which is absolutely exploded
in the Chinese market and is starting to get really

(15:02):
big in Southeast Asia. It's harmony OS and the band
hasn't actually weakened China all, it's made them stronger. And
if I were, you know, sort of some of these
US companies, I would be a little scared because, you know,
there's this new operating system, there's new silicon technologies coming out.
China just announced an analog chip that uses analog, not

(15:25):
digital technologies. It's vastly faster than anything digital, uses a
fraction of the power. Now, look at the data seender situation.
Power consumption is a real issue. There's a race on
with AI. It's geopolitical. China could get the edge through this,
you know, it's everything's up for grabs.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, probably the biggest most flashy text splash of the
year wasn't entirely successful. It was metas smart glasses. Oh yeah,
events where the demos sort of failed. But actually it
was quite impressive how far they've come in smart glasses,
right I am.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
I was Astralia recently and for some reason, you can't
get them in New Zealand. I mean, why don't we
get certain things in New Zealand? I mean, Google, where
is a pixel phone?

Speaker 1 (16:07):
Never?

Speaker 2 (16:09):
You know, this is a weird thing. But I had
to play with a pair of meta glasses and they
were the Oakley ray band or Oakley ray band which
one ray bands, and these things were seriously nice and
you put them on. You've got an assistant. Basically you
can talk through through the glasses and uses bone productions
so you can always hear this cons assistant wherever you are,

(16:29):
and it's got a camera. And I just looked around
and said describe and a couple what it was. Describe this?
It described it to me. I said, translate that sign it?
Did you know? And Facebook have demonstrated other prototype glasts
where you wear a band on your wrist. It can
track all the tender movements so you can do hand
gestures and all track movement and you are displays built

(16:50):
into the glasses that overlay reality, so you can have
a graphic pop up beside someone, so having a chat
with someone negotiating a deal. The glasses can do stress
and they've voice tell you if they're lying or not,
you know, or if you if you're in a strange
city you need to find your way around, you'll get
a map overlay on the streets and three dimensions atill
point you where we need to go. And these new

(17:11):
glasses are I mean, the technology is very tantalizing. But
will we see it in New Zealand. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
Well, eventually it will hit critical mass and they'll have
to sell it here. But it's interesting that Meta spent
so much money on virtual reality, brought Oculus and created
its reality labs spent forty to fifty billion dollars trying
to create the metaverse that hasn't really worked. But here
we have an augmented reality sort of world that could

(17:42):
be the breakthrough and may even be the format that
smartphones morph into.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
I mean, yeah, and it's something I'm going to touch
on later on. I mean, that's another key trend that
I think is going to be really excited in tweeny
twenty six, So watch the.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Space Okay, so smart glasses, yeah, twenty twenty six. Related
to that another wearable smart rings. We both had a
crack at the at wearing the Samsung smart ring. This year,
there are a couple more on the market.

Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, I'm amazed. Actually, how many have just started surfacing
your whole pile of little parallel import brands? As a
Samsung brand is an Aura brand, I think? So a yeah,
why can't they just call them something normal, bobbed, you know,
But yes, it's interesting. I mean, you know, you can
wear a smart watch. It'll track your health, it'll track
your heart rate. But I mean they're seriously big. It's

(18:30):
like giving a hubcap on your damn risk. And you know,
notifications are a real distraction. I whan I've lost count
the amount of times I've been working my way through
a complex subject, researching a story or whatever, and I've
got a notification off my watch totally derailed my train
of thought, and another two hours later, I'm finally back
where I was. You know, so they're blessing and a
curse smart watches, but smart rings they aren't obtrusive. You

(18:53):
put them on your finger they don't bombard with notifications.
They're tiny, they fit on your finger and I don't
get in the way. And the thing I really like
about them is that by monitoring your health stats, they
can actually tell you proactively when you're coming down with
a cold or a flu a week before you start
noticing symptoms.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Are they more accurate than smart watches generally?

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yes. In my initial testing, I was really surprised at
just how good it actually was. And I got a
blood pressure cuff, I got a digital thermometer, and I
tested the Jesus out of the smart ring and I
was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty close to mark. I mean,
it's obviously not going to be medical grade perfect, but

(19:36):
it's right up there.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, And I think for particularly for people who are
runners and just want to go completely minimalist, it will
gather all of that data. It doesn't have to have
the phone there, so then we'll sink it when you
come back to the house. So from that point of view,
the thing for me is I just kept forgetting to
charge it, you know, so yeah, it's flat, and then

(19:58):
to yet another thing, I have to charge it.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
I have another trend that will cover that off. So
twenty twenty six, so we'll get to that show. We
can keep listening people.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Okay, so we've covered smart rings. Let's a bit of
a chat about streaming. What happened in twenty twenty five
either than the price going up?

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Oh well, this is the thing. I mean, there's a
real history about this, and I've written about this in
The Herald years ago when the whole you know, piracy
regulation thing and the copyright amendments were all going through,
and I did a lot of research and very quickly
came to the conclusion that, you know, piracy is an
unwinnable game of whack a mole for regulators. No one
has won the piracy game. And the only way we've

(20:42):
actually put a real dent and piracy has been through
the launch of streaming services. You know, not only did
they push video easy into extinction, thank god, because going
and getting a videotape in the southerly is not great fun.
But you know, they sort of put a dent in
local broadcasters, PATV broadcasters, video stores, but also they actually

(21:03):
put a real crimp in piracy statistics. Piracy went down
massively with outvent of Netflix, Amazon, Apple Plus, because you
go pick up something and watch it, and it was
twenty bucks a month or something was affordable, you know.
But this year we've seen a lot of these companies
up in their prices, putting restrictions on who you can

(21:23):
share your account with, and all sorts of things that
have made them really unattractive. Add to that a cost
of living crisis. People are starting to go, my, the
hell with this, and they're bat piraty again. And piracy
is actually starting to.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Increase, right, And we do have legislation which was sort
of ill conceived. We've written about this fifteen years ago
or something, which was very much aimed at.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Streaming download peer to peer downloads mainly. Yeah, but I
mean a lot of streaming is peer to peer anyways.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
Yeah, that's right. So they went after the peer to
peer networks and left all these streaming sites. So you
saw just like all these illegal streaming sites crop up.
Then they decided they're recording companies for music and the studios.
It was too expensive to go after New Zealanders to
prosecute them, so nothing has happened there. But we have

(22:13):
seen this return to piracy driven by this just as
share expense of it.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
And also, I mean, look, virtually every key we home
well held Kei Home has fiber, and downloading a TV
episode now with gigabit fiber is an exercise in two minutes.
You know, it is just so effortless now, whereas you know,
about fifteen years ago, we were all sitting on you know,
DSL if we were lucky, or fifty six K mode
ands we're really unlucky, and downloading a TV episode was

(22:40):
a day's work. Yeah, so it's going to be interesting
to watch. And I think the other side of the
coin is that consumers are a lot more savvy. You know,
they've all got VPNs and they're all looking at services
that hide their tracks. And even if law changes happen,
it's going to be really hard not the crack. And

(23:01):
if streaming services keep going the way they are, you know,
it's going to be interesting. What happened?

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Do you think there's going to be some consolidation. Netflix
has survived as the juggernaut and is doing quite well.
It's really hard to tell when it comes to Apple
and Amazon just how profitable they're streaming stuff is. It's
sort of a bit of a lost leader for Amazon
Prime in terms of Prime video and similarly for Apple.
But we do have a bigger streaming ecosystem than ever,

(23:29):
but it's more frustrating for consumers because all the good
content is smanted across all these players.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
I sat down a while back and did the mathematics
on what we're paying for different streaming services, and I
shocked myself. I was really surprised that just how much
money is quietly being bled out of my bank account
every month for all these different streaming services that I
barely use. And you know, it's just a mess. So

(23:55):
I don't know. Will Amazon stay the course, Will Apple
stay the course? And then of course underneath that you've
got brick Box and all these other sort of you know,
second tear streaming services as well, and behind that you've
got YouTube, the sleeping giant smart TVs bring it into
everyone's lounge. But will people continue to pay vast amounts

(24:16):
of money as they're struggling to feed themselves and heat
their owns? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (24:20):
I don't think so. And it's been interesting in watching
the New Zealand streaming landscape in terms of our own broadcasters,
and I think Timmans has done a good job. It's
a much better user experience now, you know, the ads
aren't really clunky and jarring when they come in. But
the reality is they're really up against it, aren't they

(24:40):
staying relevant?

Speaker 2 (24:41):
This is to my mind one of the probably the
most critical little tech battles happening that no one knows
anything about. And you know what we're starting to see,
of course, is cargo culture happening in New Zealand. You know,
New Zealand culture, New Zealand stories are being lost in
the sea of Netflix, Apple, Amazon, yahd Yah yah and
I I think TV and z TV three they all

(25:02):
have a really compelling point of difference. They need to
play as hard and as fast as they can. Unfortunately
requires money, and that is producing New Zealand content, telling
New Zealand stories, hearing New Zealand accents on the TV.
I mean, you know, there's been some great New Zealand
content produced, but there's just not enough of it. And
I think New Zealanders need a reason to get behind

(25:23):
New Zealand content. And you know, the government did slap
that there was that taxa talking about changes to video production,
but it's still nibbling around the edges of the problem. Yeah,
and I think, you know, if that doesn't change, so
we're going to lose something pretty precious.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
What we also need more of is electric vehicles if
we're going to hit our twenty fifty or even twenty
thirty targets for emissions reduction. That you know, flipping the
fleet is essential to that. But effectively, since the subsidies
came off, sales are really tanged, haven't they.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
It's really interesting they have dipped. And it's quite sad
because you know, up until sort of twenty twenty five,
you could walk down the road and you know, there
was quite good odds that an electric car would just
quietly were passed. You to be an MG or a
BYD or you know, if you're especially wealthy, a tesla.
But like you're saying, I mean, you know, it's starting

(26:17):
to change, and it's really interesting. I mean EV's are
pretty compelling, you know they. I've got a friend who
bought a BYD. He's got his house fittered with solar
and he's basically charging his car, has got a car
to petrol car for long distance driving the EV for
you know, driving between the coast and Wellington, and he's

(26:38):
basically saving a ton of money.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
Even with the road using charges now applied, it's still
a really good economic compared to what.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
You're paying at the fuel pump. Definitely, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
And I think this year has been characterized really by
the arrival of a whole ranging new Chinese brands, Cherry
being one of them.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yep, Cherry MG byd I've lost.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Count great Great Wall has sort of utes and stuff
now and then the Shark, the bad Shike massive, yes,
hybrid ute.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's a beast, that thing. And this
is the thing. I mean, you know, back in the
sort of seventies and eighties, you know, the Japanese took
over the car market, and I think we're seeing history
repeat but with Chinese. And you know, the Chinese EV's
just everywhere. It's interested in going to China. You know,
back in the eighties or nineties, you went to China,
it was smoggy, it was noisey, it was chaotic. But

(27:30):
you go there now and I can't know how quiet
it is. Everything's electric, evening just quietly worse passed you
and the air is actually clean, which is quite shocking too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
I think there's still a couple of challenges around evs,
even though the price is quite attractive now, the infrastructure
for charge out and about. You're still sort of curing sometimes,
so we just need more infrastructure quickly. It's been doing
a great job and others, but you know, I think
the government put a big commitment to increase the number

(28:01):
of EV charges. That needs to happen, definitely. Yeah, And
also just dispelling the myths about the safety of lithium
ion batteries, which there is summers there, but compared to
petrol diesel vehicles, you never hear about them going up
in smoke because it's a lot more common.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Well, this is really interesting you mentioned this because my
colleague Gary Steele, who co owned Which Doctor, wrote a
story about this a while back, just about how there
was an accident between a bus and a vehicle and
the bus caught fire and you know, all over social
media was our batteries exploded and you know, the sky
is falling. It turned out, of course, that was a

(28:38):
petrol vehicle that a caught fire and set the bus
on fire and large parts of the bus of fiberglass
POxy resume glass that burns like anything. And you know,
so there is a lot of misinformation around there about this,
a lot of fear and a lot of fair uncertainty
in doubt, but there is a trend coming intween twenty
six I will touch on that really addresses that.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah. I mean, we're sitting in my apartment building in
Wellington and the Body corporate here has banned electric vehicles
from being in the garages underneath this building because they're
so worried about a cargoing on fire and basically taking
out the entire building because it's really hard to put
these battery fires out. It is luckily three minutes down

(29:21):
the road is the Central Wellington fire station, but it's
still not on strike. There's just that fair fact there.
We've got to get over and you know, the technology
is relatively very safe, so hopefully we'll see that happen.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Now here's the crazy thing. Electric vehicles are nothing new.
I mean they had electric vehicles at the turn of
the century. Yeah, you know in New York in the
turn of the century. If you've caught a taxi it
was electric. Yeah, you know, it didn't go very far
and lead acid battery, so you have five miles or
something crazy, but yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
But yeah, but we're also saying I've been traveling a
bit this year and it's amazing, including here in New
zeal in airports and that you're seeing these big industrial
robotic vacuum cleaners. You go to restaurants. I was in Spain,
Ireland and a lot of food is now being delivered
to tables by robots. By robots, dirty plates been collected

(30:15):
from tables, so just you know, and that is seeping
into the home as well, like the robot Great New
Zealand company making robotic lawnmowers.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
They're awesome. They're awesome, and you know, a robot launmight
is something I cover deeply. You know, I have quite
a large section and mowing lawns is basically ours out
of my life. I'm never getting back. If I can
find a robot that can do that for me, I'm
in Like Flynn, I just have to talk the fiscal
manager into approving budgets. But they're great, and you know,

(30:48):
this has twenty twenty five has really been the year
that home robots have come of age. I mean, you know,
robot vacuum clean is that everywhere you.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Know, and ebot I've had in the apartment here. It
specializes in deep kipe, which we have does a great job.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah. Yeah, and the latest ones I've got the ex
eleven at home that I just reviewed. And this thing
can actually lift itself over steel threshold, so you know,
from carpenter to toll floors. It's got AI built in,
so i'd avoid sea things on the ground and avoids them.
You know. Used to be that a robot vacuum a
few years back would run over a USB charging cable.
It would tangle up, the robot would stop. We'd have

(31:23):
to run and take it apart untangle it. By the end,
you might as well vacuum yourself. This new breed and
new generation with AI and actually does the job really well.
And I'm actually struggling to tell the difference between a
robot vacuum in my kitchen and me going in the
kitchen and doing it with the vacuum climber that yeah,
good they've got.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah. So this is the sort of the future we've
been promised for a long time.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Where Jetson's we're here.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, a lot of the sort of the hassle and
the mundane stuff in life is taken over by robots.
And we're going to talk about your picks for twenty
twenty six around humanoid robots. Oh yeah, oh yeah, but
let's just touch on small homes. We're sort of both
enthusiasts of this, you know, connecting up the thermostats, lights,
all sorts of stuff to control our homes. The ecosystem

(32:11):
is definitely getting a lot more cohesive now, right.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah, this is yeah, And look you've hit the nail
right on the head. This is the number of the issue. Previously,
you had three competing ecosystems. You had Apple's Home Kit,
you had Googles what was Google's called Google Homes, and
then you had Alexa. They were incompatible and if you
went up and bought smart home gadgets, you had to
make sure you bought the right ecosystem for what you've

(32:34):
already had in your house. And to say that was annoying,
painful and expensive as an understatement, But everyone in the
industry put the head together. They came up with the
standard called matter and that's now starting to mature and
we're seeing a lot of Matter capable gadgets hitting the market.
These things will basically work regardless if you have an Alexa,
Apple Surrey or a Google what are these smart things

(32:57):
called the Google one's complaining Google Home devices Home? Yeah, yeah,
you know, they'll just work and I mean that's really great.
So I mean smart homes I think are just really
coming of age. And I mean I've got smart home
year this year I've used it. I mean the new
ring doorbell. Yeah that with the smart TV, which I'll
get to what a combination.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
Yeah, I've got one of those rings on the way
into the apartment and if someone gets out of the lift,
it's got a proximity sensor, so if they go the
other way, it doesn't send me an alert, but if
they come up to my front door, yes, that will
alert me. Says They've got really sharpe in terms of
what they're capable of doing.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
And I mean Mike Greyhound comes in, it tells me
there's a dog at the door. Courrier drops off a
package at my door. It tells me there's a package
at my door. And of course if there's a porch
partron and steal the package, they're on camera as well.
So yeah, you know it's I think that's really cool.
And the other thing, I really loved smart light bulbs.
They're nothing new, but my god, they're fun, you know.
And I mean you can change the ammens of a

(33:56):
room so quickly and so easily, you know, and I've
been using the whiz Hdumi light strip sync thing on
the back of my TV and it sort of does
for video what's around sound does for audio. Yeah, so
I'm watching TV there's an underwater scene. All of a
sudden in the back wall and the ceiling are blue
and shimmering like water, and it's just it's really immersive.

(34:19):
It's kind of cool.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, it's cool. And in my apartment, as you can see,
there's no overhead lights. Yes, it's nineteen sixties apartment. They
didn't install lights as a design thing. So I've been
putting these sorts of panels, led panels and light strips
to light the side off the room and it's working
out really well. And seeing as we're talking Gadget's twenty

(34:44):
twenty five, any real standout things that you've had in
your lab testing this.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah, Oh look, I mean there's been a whole bunch
of things. I mean, first one I think would be
the Shark Ninja pizza robines. It's not technically tech, but
it is sort of, you know, out of nowhere. This
brand called Ninja just popped up and they're actually an
American brand, even though they sound like a Chinese knockoff,
and they basically said, hey, do you want to review

(35:12):
this pizza oven. And as well as worrying about tech,
I write about food. So I went down to Pizza rap.
I learned how to make really good pizzas and YadA
YadA ya, and this thing really astonished me. I was
crafting Neapolitan style pizzas with no effort. You know, it's
totally bomb proof. And the thing I love about it
is that it's got a pizza stone, but it's also

(35:34):
got a little palett box. He put wood pealetts in
and it supplies a bit of smoke, so you get
that wood fired pizza thing happening. Yeah, it's really good.
I mean an the amount of money we've saved going
out for pizza, you know, because I don't need to
I can make them as good as anywhere go out
for dinity.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
Yeah, it's what eight hundred bucks I think that says for.
And what's good about it is not just a pizza oven.
It can do a brisket, it can do a low
and slow cook, it can do a roast. Oh yeah,
all of those sorts of things as well.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
So I've got to say a roast chalk in the
thing is absolutely brilliant, you know.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Yeah, yeah, You've been covering TVs for for a long
time and it sort of seems to have run out
of steam really in terms of innovation and TVs. We've
gone eight K, we've gone O lead, Q leads, we've
gone HDR, we've gone one hundred and twenty herds and more.
Anything exciting in the TV world.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Well, yeah, this is a part of the trade. I mean,
occupational hazard is reviewing TV. So I've put my back
up more times than I can count, lugging a you know,
an eighty five inch TV up onto the TV cabinet.
But one TV that stood out, really stood out for
me was Pattersonic Z ninety five A. This TV it's
only D so it's got those beautiful contrast level, super

(36:45):
vivid colors on screen, motions, silky smooth. It's four K,
so if you can get four K footage, it looks fantastic.
But the selling point for me that really got me excited.
It's got an EXI built in. And just the other
night I was watching SO and someone came to the
door and I got to pop up on the TV
of video pop up showing his people at the door

(37:07):
overlaying what I was watching on TV, and I was like, oh.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
Okay, it's coming from your ring camera.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Ring camera on my front door. Just saw them and
because the TV's got Alexa on it and I've got
the a Lexus skill installed, this video popped up. And
the other thing I love about it is that I
don't use the remote. I just talked to my TV
and Alexa turned the volume down twenty percent. Alexa, find
me something good on YouTube. Yeah, and it just works.
It's a smart TV. I mean there's a lot of

(37:32):
smart TVs out there, but some of them are pretty
horrible to use. Yeah, this isn't I actually found this
really usue.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
I think we were a bit skeptical when we went
to the launch of that about Amazon basically taking over
the operating system of a TV. But it does work.
You do have to sort of sign in to make
the most of it as an Amazon account hold in
which I'll get a larry off, but then it's sort
of it does a reasonable job of using AI. I
guess going, Okay, these are the things you're interested in.

(38:01):
So the front screen displays all of that, and then
the slight home capability.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
So it's Amazon. I mean the downside of course being
an Amazon operating system, as it puts Amazon Prime first
and foremost, so if you're not an Amazon Prime user, Yeah,
it's not ideal. But it's Android based, the fire tam
is and Android basing, so you can sideload so many different
call aps. I've actually got the Xbox app on it
and I've peered a control up of the TV. I'm
playing Xbox games on my TV with just a controller.

(38:28):
I don't even need an Xbox. Yeah, that's kind of cool.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
Samsung, solid, solid year for Sam saying nothing really exciting.
I was more interested really LGA. The C five I
had to look at, was very impressed there with you
know again the black blacks, all of that letter is
just fantastic. You had to look at the G five,
which is the high end one.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
Yeah, the G five astonished me. I mean it was
only it has the one drawback with O letters. It's
not always as bright as LCD with backlighting. But LG
have got this new only technology. I can't what the
heck they call it. It's got a TLA, a three
letter acronym, but it's super super bright and you could
almost use this TV as a tanning clinic. It's that

(39:10):
bright and it was eye popping, absolutely beautiful to use.
And the other thing I really like about the LGG
five was the remote has a gyroscope in it, so
you moved the remote around with your wrist and a
pointer moves around on the screen. And I handed the
remote to my wife as a litmus test to see
how duredive it was without telling her how to use it.
She sort of sat there for a couple of minutes

(39:30):
going what the heck, you know, and then five minutes
sadus she was merely away.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
You know, it's a great minimalist remote. They've redesigned for
those TVs, so it's just a simpler way of interacting
with it.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
Just good design, you know. And I think, like you say,
the technology, I think it's matured for TVs, but design hasn't.
And this is where players like Samsung, LG, Panasonic are
really earning the stripes, you know, they're refining the design
and just making the TV is much more joyful to you.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Yeah, and similarly, in the smartphone market, it's sort of
running out of steam in terms of innovation and design tricks.
They can come up with anything excite you this year
in phones.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
Phones. Yeah, so phones are absolutely fascinating. Foldables. You know,
there are so many foldables coming out, and I my
daily driver is a Galaxy Z fold seven phone. It's
beautiful and it folds up. It no longer feels like
I've got a phone book in my pocket, so you know,
I'm no longer ripping the lining out of my pockets.

(40:33):
Out of my pockets.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
And that's the first year. Really it took sort of
seven iterations to get to a point where the S
twenty five Ultra, you know, you actually probably tip towards
the foldable if you could afford it.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
This is the thing. I mean, the foldables now so compelling.
I mean, the only thing I think S twenty five
Ultra has over the foldables is the cameras. Yeah, it's
got beautiful cameras, but this foldable, it's gorgeous. It just
does everything, you know. And the thing which doctor puts
a lot of which octor is high fi and the
thing a lot. But we don't know about Samsung is

(41:04):
their phones actually have what they call adapt hearing, and
you can put a set of headphones on and far
up adapt hearing with your phone and dial the audio
output to your specific hearing and the difference that makes
with the sound is phenomenal. So yeah, I'm really taken
with it. It's been the year I think of the foldable,
and I think Apple's iPhone fold whoever they're going to

(41:26):
call it a crazy marketing name. I think that's just
going to basically add a whole new level of competition
into the foldable genre and we're just going to see
things get better.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah, I've been using the Opophone X nine, which I
really like. I think it's the coming of age. They've
still got a bit of work to do, but at
the high end, you know, they always really struggled to
compete against Samsung, so I think this is the start
maybe if of that happening. We've also got Honor coming
into the market launching.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
It's really exciting. I mean, you know, I was a
bit of a wi Awei fan where I love to
phones when their cameras were astonishing, you know, and with
Wahwei no longer in the market, I was a bit sad.
But with Honor coming, which has Whawei DNA, it's no
longer really waycas I them off. But if they can
get the same level of innovation as Whahwei had. You know,
that's only going to be great news because you know,

(42:18):
the amount of bang you're getting for your buck with
a phone now is just astonishing. I you know, I
found in my drawer a few months back an original
Galaxy Samsung Galaxy. I picked it up, I charged it up,
parted on and it was nice. But I just couldn't
get over just how far we'd come in such a
short time. And yeah, this is all to do with competition,

(42:41):
and you know, more players in the market, more competition,
cheaper phones that do more for less. It's a win win.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Situation and that Chinese ecosystem of phones me as well.
So yeah, it's good. They're putting pressure on, particularly on
Samsung as the biggest sort of Android maker in this
country anyway, they're huge.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
But you know what I want for Christmas this year?
That's that a pixel phone. Why can Google bring the
pixel phone to New Zealand? Come on, Google, Stephen as
an online store or something. I guess there's a bit
of customization they have to do, but it would go
off well. I mean, it's not a cheap phone, but
there neither is the foldable phones. I mean, people have
got the money for a phone. Yeah, and they're beautiful phones.
They're really nice phones. Why can't they launch the New

(43:24):
Zealand come on Google? Yeah? Finally.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
The other big category is computers, obviously, and I haven't
had a huge play with Windows laptops. But I was
disappointed really at the start of the year a lot
of hype around co Pilot PCs, and with the neural
processing unit built in supposedly to do all this AI
functionality on Windows based PCs, it was a bit of

(43:47):
a fizzer. Really.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, I've got to say it. I'm pretty much in
the same boat as you. I sort of. You know,
I'm a three six five premium subscriber, which means I'm
paying a lot more than I was a few months back.
But the Copilot thing, I fired it up because it
comes with the three sixty five plan. It's nice, but
you know, if you ask to generate a document for you,

(44:08):
like a PowerPoint presentation, it can do that, but then
you've still got to do half the work yourself, and
it's clunky, and you compare it with the likes of
Perplexity or Gemini, and I think they've just got such
a long way to go, you know, you know, when
you're an operating system vendor, your key strength should be
integrating all those features directly into the operating system. And

(44:29):
I think they've singularly failed to do that.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Yeah, and there's this switch in terms of the hardware
to iron architecture. It hasn't gone particularly well. But what
do you think the whole concept of sort of edge
computing where a lot of the applications take, for instance,
of the Adobe Sweet they're adapting themselves so that a
lot more of the processing happens on this neural processing

(44:53):
units on your device. It takes the load off the
central processing units, so you should get faster results sending
less information to the cloud.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yeah, this is the thing. This is and this is
the other big trend of twenty twenty five. The cloud has,
you know, from a little we strata cumulus is now
this massive cyclonic storm system that everyone is plugged into.
And it's really interesting. If you're an enterprise in New Zealand,
you're using AI, you're doing business queries about a sensitive topics,
takeover a merger or something, and using AI to generate

(45:26):
a document or proof of document whatever that's going to
the cloud. You know, and I can just see so
many potential security issues around that, regardless of what spin
the various cloud writers put on that. So it's it's
a fascinating one and I just don't know how that's
going to land, to be honest. Yea, But the arm

(45:48):
processor thing. The thing I really love about arm processes
is their battery life. Incredible. These laptops just go and
go and go and go, and you know, you're away
from the office more than you're in the office nowadays,
and having that battery life is critical. And yet at
the same time, we're running all this AI stuff which
is really energy hungry, you know, so we're expecting more

(46:11):
of our PCs, but of course we're also wanting longer
battery life, and the silicon using your PC plays a
huge part in that. And I think this is where
Armory has got something to offer. Although I do feel
sorry for Intel at the moment.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
You know, they've heard in trouble and the government is
effectively bailing them out by taking a stake in them,
which is really weird.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
I don't see that being sustainable. I mean, they if
they can't innovate. You know, the tech industry is littered
with records from this in the past, and the US
government just doesn't seem to be learning from its previous mistakes.
And the tech industry, you know, if Intel don't start
innovating delivering what people want and need, they're not going
to survive.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
Okay, looking forward to twenty twenty six, put your few
tryst had on and your market trends experience to bear
on this. What are you picking in terms of tech trends,
new categories or finally the arrival of categories that have
been talked about for a long time.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
When you asked me to do this, so we know,
I did some research, hey, researching, you know, and one
of the first things I stumbled across was smart contact lenses. Wow,
and these things that are the size of normal contact Lensmen,
they've got their own built in display and power source
and you were a movement tracking bracelet so you can
do hand gestures with them, which is probably a microphone

(47:38):
somewhere so you can use voice commands, and you literally
have a computer display built into your eyes. So you know,
this could actually see smartphones look like as quaint as
a model t forward very very shortly. I mean, you
could always have access to the metaverse and have augmented
reality or even virtual reality overlaid on your world. So

(48:01):
you want a shopping list at the supermarket, it's there.
You need to get to a new building in another town,
it'll guide you there.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
So going past smoke glasses, almost hopping over it. Will
Will people be comfortable wearing a you know, contact lens,
presumably it's going to be a bit thicker than a
typical one.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah, the early models I've seen aren't exactly as thin
as a disposable contact. I mean, they're chunky monkeys. But
I suspect, like any technology, it's going to mature, and
as it mature is it's going to become really compelling.
Your twenty twenty six will b when I think that
category starts getting some airtime and there'll be a bit
of g w was around it, but you know it's

(48:41):
going to be a big watch. The space.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah, one category that got a lot of airtime this year,
really thanks to the hype around Elon Musk and his
what's it called the robot?

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Oh gosh, I can't remember, Rosie.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
No, No, it's Ultimate Optimus.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Yeah, I keep them transformers. You're optimists.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
So he did his big, flashy debut off the robot
and then had that event where he had the robotic
taxes and he had the humanoid robots, although that I
think they were being remotely controlled, so it was a
bit smoke and mirrors. But we're definitely seeing a lot
more humanoid robots doing impressive things.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
It's yeah, definitely, And I mean, you know, twenty twenty
five was the era where people started dabbling with it
and manufacturer started ramping up what they've been doing. And
there's a whole bunch of players in the US and
China doing stuff. And the humanoid robots have got to
the point where they can pick things up, they can
recognize objects, they can do a lot of stuff that's
really handy. But what we're starting to see now is

(49:45):
increasingly affordable AI silicon, increasingly compact AI models marry that
with a humanoid robot. You could soon see a humanoid
robot that could become your own in house housekeeper. And
I wouldn't be surprised if in late twent twenty six
in some markets humor and robots become the next must
have consumer electronics category for the well held. You know,

(50:08):
if you can afford it, you'll have one of these things.
In your house or do your vacuumen. It will fold
your laundry, it'll cook for you, you know.

Speaker 1 (50:15):
And as Musk points out at you, I think ninety
percent if the engineering work now on humanoids is in
the hand.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Yeah, you've got to have those degrees of movement as
touch sensitivity, dexterity. It's, you know, the hard stuff's pretty
much been done. It's you know, it's a category that's
about to really ignite. And I think next year it
could be the year it really starts to happen, you know.
And you've got China doing some incredible stuff, You've got
the US doing some incredible stuff. And there was a robot.

(50:45):
The first robot was commercially launched about a month ago,
twenty thousand US dollars. I can't read the name of
it now. It looked really compelling until you realize that
it wasn't actually driven by AI but a minimum wage
graduate dark room somewhere at corporate HQ, remote your pilot
and to sing inside your house. You're all sorts of
privicy concerns. And it was a bit creepy, yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Very very creepy, and slightly creepy as well. It's just
a military application of this. You know, there's just the
robotic dogs, for instance, So I will be sent into
war in the next big land war. You've got the
drones that are on the front lines killing people every day.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
And one of these guys says, are you sir, economy,
I'm booking it out of here. You know, it's I mean,
it's definitely going to be fascinating to watch, and it's
just going to be like a lot of tech, it's
going to be wild down predictable. Who knows. What do
you think.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
About the you know, the big sort of term this
year was AI Agent's agentic AI and a lot of
hype around it. And you know, I've seen lots of
demos of this and action. Some of it works, okay,
some of it doesn't. Some of it's super expensive. When
you actually break down the cost, sometimes you might have
five or six agents working in the background. That's tokens

(52:02):
and tokens that you are burning with these big hyperscalers.
What do you think about what is coming in twenty
twenty six with agentic AI.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
Well, it's really interesting you mentioned that because recently I
got on an early advanced beta of Perplexities Comet browser.
This thing has a gentic and ergenic version of perplexity
built into it, and it's free to use, actually, which
is quite surprising. And if you're a free user, you

(52:34):
get a very limited number of queries you can use
with it. I mean, obviously they want their shareholders kept happy,
so they're going to charge you for whatever, and they've
got data centers to pay for. But just using this
thing on the free mode, I said to it, find
me returned business class flights to Singapore times dates are
not a problem. Find me the best date, best airline,

(52:54):
and tell me the best month to go. And that
would have been probably I would guess half a day's
work for someone to sit down and do that manually,
because you were finding the data and you're recutting it,
reslicing it. This thing went away, and it actually showed
me how it was using a different website, travel labrogration sites.
It was actually like a human being dropping down drop
box forms, clicking radio buttons, filling in my information, like

(53:19):
a human being doing my bidding. And it went away
and did it five minutes. Said I had a full
list of cheap flights by airline, by month, etc. Et cetera,
and I was astonished with amount of money it could
have saved me if I'd had actually been serious about
doing it. You know, it knock something like two and
a half k off over return flight. You know.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
So it's getting better, and I think one of the
things in twenty twenty six that will be even more
impressive is the agents. The length of the task that
they can complete is getting longer and longer. Yeah, so,
you know, we will get to the point probably in
twenty twenty six where in the enterprise world anyway, where
you can set it to do some bit of add

(54:00):
that would normally take someone all day to do and
have multiple elements and need multiple different sources of information,
and you'll just set that to work and it will
do in thirty minutes what took seven eight hours.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Yeah, weeks. Maybe this is the thing I think, and
the corollery to there is a lot of people are going,
oh my god, I'm gonna lose my job. But here's
the thing AI hallucinates. It makes mistakes, and it can
get very simple things wrong and be totally unaware that
it's done it. So people still needed to keep an
eye on the AI, and you need people who can

(54:35):
write good AI prompts and manage the AIS. So I
don't really think there's going to be a lot of
job losses, but I think we're going to start doing
a lot more with what we already have, so it
could drive a lot of productivity increases. Yeah, if we
get it right, it's a bigger if.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Yeah, And yes, I was a bit skeptical really at
the start of the year, really about our ability to
get it right. But the more I see companies adopting
this technology, I think they're quite shrewd here in New Zealand.
You know, they're not doing massive, flashy spins. And even
though startups we don't have a lot of AI centric startups,

(55:11):
what we're seeing is a tech companies are embracing AI
and building it into what they're selling. And I think
that's slightly more sustainable than just like going where we're
going all in on AI. Government's still, you know, lagging
in terms of understanding what we need to do with
the workforce for upskilling and reskilling to actually take best

(55:33):
avent totally.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
You know, we're nibbling around the edges of it, and
I think what I'd like to see from the government
is a proper task force looking into this and making
some recommendations and making it a multi party task force.
I mean, the problem we see with so many of
these sort of emerging technologies are investigated by governments is
governments are so slow moving. It's like wading through frozen

(55:54):
triagule dealing with them. And then, of course, you know,
and election comes along and one party gets pushed by
another party becomes government. That party dismantles the previous government's work,
sets up their own stuff. Three is later, their stuff's dismantled.
The need effect is, of course we're standing still, which
in tech means we're going backwards.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
And I think you know what we need is for
all sides of the house to go, look, this is
a game changer for our economy. We need to do this.
Everyone needs to agree that we need a long term,
twenty year strategy.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Yeah, and we've got an election coming up. I doubt
AI is going to be an election year issue or
anything tech related, but labor is you know, the future
of work and employment. So you know, Labor party and
the incumbent should be concerned about it.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
I think they should. I mean, if I were both
all parties, I'd be looking at you know, a government
level national COEO. Yeah, you know, and I would have
someone whose job it was was to monitor all these
different tech trends and help enable businesses. You know, we've
got a great, big neighbor seven times our size and
three hours they've hoovered up a lot of the gold

(57:02):
out of our economy. We're focused on a very narrow
part of the economy selling, but it's dead animals and
trees to the world. We're a price taker, we're not
a price maker. Our economy is to a narrow It
means we're very exposed to geopolitics and global economic shocks.
What we need to do is to add value to
our economy, and I think tech is one of the
key areas doing that. But like I was saying before,

(57:25):
we don't have a strategy, we don't have a long
term approach. Maybe the government and reous other parties should
take that to heart.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
One last sort of thing for twenty twenty six. So
I know that you've been looking into solid state batteries.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Yeah, it was really interesting. So you're talking about EV's
and you know lithium. Yeah, it doesn't mix the water
or oxygen very well, has a habit of going boom,
very hard to put out. Also, you know, the downsider
with an EV is you've got to plug it into
a charger and are fully charged. An EV you think
up to eight hours, you know, and you've got rain anxiety.

(58:00):
You know, it may only be you know, one hundred
and twenty k's to get to you know, parapraam from Wellington,
But there are hills, and that means your battery life
takes a much bigger hit than what it initially thinks.
Lithium on batteries have a very finite energy density that
take a long time to charge. You're a fire risk.

(58:22):
Solid state batteries don't use lithium. They use a solid
electrolyte and this gives them a few advantages. Are much
higher powering, so they can hold much more charge. So
solid state batteries in theory could see cars having a
fifteen hundred mile range of a single charge. You know,
suddenly that range anxiety just goes away.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
You know.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Also, they charge really really fast, and you know, in
theory and I sort of think this is quite there, ye,
but in theory you should be able to charge a
sol state battery as fast as you're putting petrol into
a standard you know, gas, GUZL and car. That's not
quite the case yet, but who knows. And then the
other thing is that you can put a nail through
a soli state battery. You can drop them in a

(59:06):
bath of water. They won't go bang. They're very very safe. Right. So,
and with evs, that's exciting. That's a total game change
that could see EV's becoming far more compelling than they
already are. But then add that to laptops, to smart watchers,
smart rings, all those other products. Imagine a smart watch
that just held a charge and ran for three weeks. Yeah,

(59:30):
that would be nice, wouldn't it be great? I mean,
I've got the smart watch on my wrist that does
sleep tracking. The only problem is I'm going to take
it off from charge every night.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Well that's the Apple Watch definitely, you know, what were
they thinking? So there's a lot of players developing solid
state batteries. Do you think any of them will sort
of hit commercial viability in twenty twenty six?

Speaker 2 (59:49):
There are a lot of players in the US, Europe
and China that say they're on the cusp of it,
And I think it's just going to be a case
of navigating the hype and finding the reality. Given the
number of players that are doing it, I think at
least one or two are going to Whoever gets there
first is going to claim a very large pot of gold.
I mean, there is huge money in this.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
And it is sodium based batteries for probably more for storage,
for power plants and that sort of thing. That's going
a long way as well, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
This is yeah. I was in South Australia recently and
I was really surprised that the sheer amount of photovoltaics
on houses over there, something like I think it's one
in three houses in South Australia has solar on the roof.
And South Australia is now generating so much surplus energy
they're finding out ways to have free electricity with some utilities.

(01:00:41):
You know, they're actually supplying other states with electricity and
they've got more than they can actually use. And I
sat look at New Zealand and go, why haven't we
done that? Why are we looking at large scale sodium
battery plants. Let's burn some more coal. It just doesn't
make any sense. I mean, you know, if you think
about you put solar on a house your house is

(01:01:02):
quy during the day because you're at the office. The
only thing drawing octricity is your fridge. All that extra
cultricity goes out to the grid, to the city, to
the factories, to office buildings where it's needed. Yeah, and
you scared out across some ent our suburbs. You're talking
a very large amount of electricity.

Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
Yeah, we've struggled on solar and you know there was
that big solar company that sort of went bust. Yeah
this year, which didn't help.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
And also just to cost electricity in this country is insane.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
Yeah, that issue has has seen manufacturing shut down in
parts of the country. So that's an existential threat anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
So what it's time to be alive?

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
What it's time to be alive A twenty twenty five
was a really interesting year dominated by AI. I think
twenty twenty six is going to be really interesting to
see how AI shakes out. There will be some losers there,
there will be a lot of value that's destroyed. Hopefully
it doesn't take down the entire global economy with it.

(01:02:00):
But a lot of these technologies that have been bubbling
away in the background, augmented by AI, are starting to accelerate,
So it's going to be a really interesting one.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
That's exactly it. When you start seeing some of these
technologies married to AI, exciting stuff starts happening. I think
next year's when some of that starts hitting the shop shelves.
You know it's going to be really exciting.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Thanks Pat for worlwind trip through tech and you can
check out all of your reviews at which doctor dot
co dot nz.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
So you're there.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Thanks so much for coming on.

Speaker 2 (01:02:29):
Happy to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:02:39):
Pewh. Well, that's it for the final episode of the
Business of Tech for twenty twenty five. A huge thanks
to Pat Pilcher for taking us on that whirlwind ride
through AI hype and reality, the streaming squeeze, ev growing pains,
and the revolutionary gadgets that actually changed how we lived
this year. Incidentally, just after we were recorded this episode,

(01:03:01):
Panasonic announced that it's pulling out of the TV market
in New Zealand, which is a real shame, but it
sort of does go to show how fast things are
moving in tech and the big names we know so
well now from the past won't necessarily be the big
names of the future. If you want to deeper dive
into any of the gear and trends we talk about.
You can read Pats reviews and commentary over at which

(01:03:23):
doctor dot co dotian zed. You'll find my own tech
reviews in the life section at Business deesk dot co dotianz.
If you enjoyed the episode, follow or subscribe to the
Business of Tech, leave a rating or review, and share
it with someone you spent too much money on tech
this year and needs to know what is coming next.
Thanks so much for listening all year forty nine episodes.

(01:03:46):
We're here every week delivering tech insights and interviews with
some of our best tech leaders, so I'd love to
have you back next year. Thanks so much to two
degrees for continuing to sponsor us into our third season,
hopefully into our fourth as well. Have a great Christmas,
a new year, and I'll see you in twenty twenty
six as we find out whether the robots really do

(01:04:08):
take over the housework and hopefully nothing more. All the
best for the year ahead.