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November 11, 2022 • 63 mins
Twitter chaos under Elon Musk; Meta's first major layoffs; FTX crashes; Gmail gets new features; Windows 11 gets iPhoto integration; Spotify might actually work better with the Apple Watch.Viewers ask how to keep a new HP computer from listening to them; if a cheap cable is good enough to fast charge an iPhone; how to stop recurring YouTube TV charges; upgrading to the newest version of Apple TV; regaining access to a hacked Instagram account.Follow Rich!richontech.tvSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
What the heck is happening with Twitter? Gmail gets a
handy feature just in time for the holidays. Spotify might
finally work properly on the Apple Watch. Plus Your tech
questions Answered? What's going on on Rich Demiro And This
is Rich on Tech, the podcast where I talk about
the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's

(00:30):
also the place where I answer the questions you send me.
I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles.
Hope you are having a fantastic day. Ah Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.
I've seen nothing absorb the the talk of the town

(00:51):
faster than Elon Musk taking over Twitter. And it's been
kind of a rough ride. I don't think the media
is helping, but it's it's really been interesting, to say
the least. Now, I will say that I feel like
my personal experience on Twitter has not changed substantially, and
I was kind of holding off on, you know, making

(01:11):
any judgments or really you know, getting kind of all
bent out of shape with the changes or you know whatever,
all the all the kind of chaos that's been happening
because a lot of this stuff happens in a vacuum,
and you know, I was waiting to see kind of like,
what's what's going on here, what's going to change for

(01:32):
the average person. And I feel like we've now surpassed that.
It's gotten to the point where I you know, and
I've said this before, I don't think the average person
uses Twitter. And I think that's the biggest problem with
Twitter is that it's not you know, if this kind
of stuff was happening with Instagram, I think it would
be a big deal if it was happening, you know,
with Facebook, probably a big deal. Twitter not so much.

(01:53):
Twitter is a very inside baseball It's like a very
clubby place, and so it's used by a lot of journalists,
used by a lot of tech people, but it's not
used by a lot of regular people. And so all
these things, all these growing pains, all these things that
you know, Elon's trying to get through. It's like, well,
nobody's really seeing that except the inside baseball people. The
average person is not, you know, sitting there using it.

(02:15):
But I do feel like there's been some developments in
the time that Elon has taken over Twitter that you know,
people are leaving, advertisers are pausing, you know, all that
kind of stuff, and so I think that the turning
point for me was when I started to see these
you know, they're having this major issue with number one,
how to monetize the website or the social media platform.

(02:38):
Number two, like, what do you do. You've got this
legacy kind of verified blue check program that they try
to switch over to this pay pay for play program.
You know, you pay eight bucks a month, you get
a blue check. Well, the problem with that is that
people started just paying the eight dollars getting that blue check,
which makes you think that someone is verified official, and

(03:02):
then they started tweeting all kinds of terrible things, you know.
The main one that I saw was the you know,
it was like a drug company and it was like,
you know, I don't know if it was Eli Lilly
or something like that, but it's like, okay, all insulin
is now free. We've made the decision. And it looked
very official because maybe one or two letters were off
in the name of the company or the Twitter handle,

(03:22):
but they had that blue check, so you're like, oh, wow,
that's coming from the actual company. I can't believe that. Now,
whether or not anyone believe that, I'm not sure whether
or not anyone went to cvs to say, hey, can
I get some free insulin? I'm not sure, but it
did make a big enough of the rounds and the retweets,
and maybe people just thought it was funny so they
retweeted it. But the reality is that it made it

(03:44):
very clear to me that there is a problem with
with the new system. You can't just give people a
blue check based on paying eight dollars, so there has
to be something else. So now the Verge is reporting that,
and all this stuff keeps changing and changing and changing,
but now they basically have There's two things going on.
Number One, if you tap the blue check on someone's account,

(04:08):
you can see if they paid for that blue check
or if it's in a it's kind of a verified account.
So if you look at mine, for instance, and I
should bring up my Twitter so I can see what
I'm talking about exactly. But if you go to sort
of my Twitter and I tweeted about this. Basically, there's
two things that happen when you when you tap the
blue check, it will either say verified account because it's

(04:31):
notable in government, news, entertainment, or another category. It'll say that,
and that's kind of like the legacy blue check. Then
if you tap the blue check and it says verified account.
This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter blue.
That's when you put up your sort of like, oh
uh oh, what's happening. Let me let me take a
closer look at the username, because if you see that,

(04:52):
that means that the person has All they've done is
paid the eight dollars. They got the blue check, and
now you know, they could be whoever they want to be.
And so now, according to the Verge, they did what
I think they should have done in the first place,
is put an official underneath the person's name. So if
you go to like Nintendo, for instance, I saw this one.

(05:13):
So if you go to Nintendo of America, it got
the blue check, and then underneath it there's now a
new thing that like a gray check that says official.
And so that's sort of taking the place of the
blue check. Very confusing, and I think that this a
very tedious process for Twitter to go through. And the
same thing happened with the with the blue check originally

(05:35):
back in the day when Twitter was owned by non
Elon Musk. You know, they had to go through and
manually make people a blue check. People like me, I
would submit my information. I would say, hey, here's who
I am, here's who I say I am, here's my account,
here's my email, here's my verification whatever. I forget what
they asked for, like different things, you know, like a
letterhead or whatever it was back in the day I

(05:57):
had to submit. And so now we're seeing that you'll
see official people. So that is what's happening right now.
We will see if this will change. I think this
a better system, but I think that an easier system
would be just a blue check, or say a gold check.
You know, if someone's paying for Twitter blue, make it
one color, make the official check another color. And I

(06:20):
think that would just be really simple. You see the
two check marks, you realize that someone has paid the money,
but then the other check mark just means that that
person is verified in a different way. And I think
what they're really trying to get out of this is
making sure that people like myself, you know, like Pony,
up the eight dollars a month to have that blue check,

(06:40):
which I'm probably not gonna do. I can't really see
a reason. Now. There is something they're offering on that
Twitter blue which I thought was interesting, is that you'll
see less ads, which is kind of nice. But your
sort of tweets and responses and all that kind of
stuff will bubble up to the top of people's feets,
which I do think is valuable because you tweet and
there is an algorithm at play that puts things in

(07:02):
various orders. So I think that having your stuff up
at the top could be worth eight dollars a month
so that people see it more. Also, I have lost
about three hundred followers on Twitter, so that could be
people that have deactivated, people that have left the platform bots,
maybe that they got rid of who knows, but I've
definitely seen that portion of it change. But to me,

(07:26):
you know, the way I've always used Twitter is that
it's just kind of one of those things that when
I want to tweet something, sort of inside baseball, that's
where I go. It's my place where I tweet to
other journalists or just get something out there officially. So
we'll see what happens with Twitter moving forward, but it
is definitely it is a learning curve for Elon Musk,

(07:48):
that is for sure. All right, let's get to the
first question of the podcast. Valories says, I have a
new computer HP, which I just got installed yesterday, and
I was told that it can listen to whatever I'm saying.
If this is true, and if so, is there a

(08:10):
way that I can stop my computer from hearing everything
I say? Thank you, Valerie. So it took me a
second to kind of think about this one because I
don't use a Windows computer regularly, although I do have
a computer on loan from Microsoft, the new Surface Laptop five.
So I said, you know, at last event I went
to I said, hey, Microsoft, it's been a while since

(08:32):
I've used a Microsoft computer because my day to day
is a Mac. And they said, all right, well, let's
get you a Windows computer for a couple months so
you can test it out, put it through the paces,
try out some of the new features and Windows eleven.
And sure enough, it arrived a couple of weeks later,
and here it is. So I've been playing with that computer.
And by the way, I have to say, I am
quite impressed with the state of affairs on the Windows

(08:54):
side of things. I think that Windows has come a
really long way. The computer is it's very slick. It
very much feels and looks and acts like my MacBook,
and some aspects are even better because you don't have
to deal with the whole Apple kind of taking a
commanding lead in everything you do. There's a lot of
things that sort of are easier or simpler or just

(09:16):
you know better on the Windows side of things, like
number one, Android phones, like they just work with a
Windows computer that you know, using a Mac for so long,
it's like an Android computer. An Android just doesn't work,
It doesn't play nice with a Mac computer. You plug
the thing into a Windows computer and wow, all your
pictures are right there. Whatever you want to do, your

(09:37):
text messages, you can run Android apps. I mean, it's
it's quite impressive. What else that's it for now, but
it's it's you know, it's pretty nice to have everything
running nicely on there, and it's it's been a it's
been good for me because I need that education. So
I can kind of talk about both sides of things. Okay,
So back to this whole Quartana thing. So basically, yes,

(09:58):
there is a setting on Windows that will allow Kortana
to respond to I believe it's hey Kortana, or maybe
it's just Kortana and is it Kortana or hey, oh gosh,
I should know this now because I was playing with
it today. So what's the Kuortana keyword okay? Or co

(10:18):
r t A n A keyword. I've got to look
this up because yeah, it's just kortana. So you don't
have to you don't have to say, hey, it's hey kuortana. Okay. Anyway,
So there is a setting you can go to Settings,
Privacy and Security, Voice Activation, and then it's a toggle
switch for let Kortana respond to Kortana keyword and a

(10:41):
lot of things on Windows pretty easy. You just just
press that Windows button and type in Kortana and you
should find the thing that you need to do. Like
if you need to do a printer thing, just type
in printer. If you need to do updates, type in
update anything. It's just one big search for the entire
computer and also your programs and also things on the web,
and also the weather. But if you want to turn
that feature off, go ahead, turn it off. And you know,

(11:03):
even when your computer's listening, yes it's listening, but there's
a it's kind of not you know, it's not sending
everything somewhere. It's basically listening locally. And then if it
hears that word, it will say, oh, I just heard
the word so let's now kind of listen to see
what they're saying, and then we'll process that audio if

(11:24):
necessary on the cloud. A lot of these systems now
have become because of privacy concerns, a lot of this
processing is done on device, and so when you hear
that term processing done on device, it means that your
device is actually doing the processing of you know, what
you say and then kind of transcribing it and then
figuring out in like a split second, is this something

(11:47):
that I need to do on the web or is
this something I need to do locally? And so it's
it's really come a long way from the days of
you know, everything was sent to the cloud, and you
know that that those days are are quickly getting behind
us because these devices have gotten so much better. So anyway,
good question, and congrats to the new computer. That's always
very exciting to have a new computer. All right, what

(12:11):
do we want to talk about next? There's there's there
was like three giant stories this week. I mean, you've
got the Twitter drama, You've got Meta, which is, you know,
cut a bunch of jobs for the first time in history,
and then you've got this big cryptocurrency situation going on,
let's talk about the cryptocurrency stuff. So I don't get

(12:32):
into crypto a whole bunch on this show, but you know,
I feel like when things again bubble up to you know,
my my wholem o with with this tech stuff is
really trying to give people, you know, give you news
that you can use, you know, information that's helpful, you know,
not just like the drama or the drama of it
or the celebrity gossip side of things. Although sometimes you know,

(12:54):
like I say, it gets to the to the forefront
so much you kind of have to and sometimes these
things to affect us in pretty big ways. And I
think when it comes to this crypto stuff, it's just
really kind of like danger, danger, danger. You gotta watch
what you do with this crypto stuff. So FTX is
a was a big cryptocurrency platform that is now filing

(13:19):
for bankruptcy. And I'm not going to get into the
whole nuance of why, but the reality is a lot
of people used FTX. This was a very popular cryptocurrency
platform in fact, and I can't believe this. Larry David
was the commercial during the Super Bowl. He was the

(13:41):
commercial for FTX, which is a total like This just
goes to show that you can't trust celebrities with your
financial decisions or even your product decisions. Because a celebrity
endorses something does not mean it's good. Celebrities get paid
a lot of money to talk about stuff, and quite frankly,

(14:01):
a lot of times it's just more of like a
manager thing, like they say, hey, this that we you know,
we've got this really good opportunity for you. You know,
you can be in this commercial. They're paying you a
million bucks, they're paying you five million bucks. All you
got to do is say this and said what is it? Well,
it's crypto. You know a lot of people are using it. Okay,
crypto cool, And next thing you know, you know you're

(14:22):
in a crypto commercial. I mean there's a lot of
celebrities that are doing this stuff. I mean Kim Kardashian,
Matt Damon, Larry David, and probably probably many many more.
In fact, if you watch TV for five minutes, which
you know, I don't see a whole lot of commercials
because I don't typically watch regular TV, but yeah, you

(14:42):
see a lot of this stuff if you watch for
five minutes. In fact, we just subscribed or resubscribed to
YouTube TV and my kids were watching it last night,
and you know they were they were really surprised at
all the commercials on their Disney channel that they were watching,
and it's like, yeah, this is regular TV. This is
what it looks like now if you're getting free TV.
It's funny to me that you have to pay for

(15:03):
YouTube TV and watch commercials because you're paying so much
for the service. Now, if you're watching over the air television,
that's sort of the currency, right, You're getting a free
channel so that you can, you know, you sit there
through ads, you know, a couple of minutes of ads
to watch free programming. That's fine, that's kind of like
the agreement. But with cable TV, it's kind of like,
wait a second, why why am I paying for this

(15:25):
and sitting through ads? That makes no sense anyway. At
any rate. FTX has filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. A
lot of people are not happy because if you have
crypto in this, in this platform, what's going to happen
to it? Do you get your money back? And I
think this whole thing happened when people were starting to

(15:47):
sort of, you know, try to withdraw their money at
a pace faster than FTX could provide it, and that's
when the problems happened, you know. So this has happened many,
many times over and over in our history of banking. Now,
if you have you know, you know, you have the
FDIIC which ensures like something like a savings or a

(16:07):
checking account. You know, that's only up to a certain
amount of money. I think it's two hundred and fifty grand.
So if you've got more money than that in any
of these things, it's like, oh, that that could be
a problem. All right. So what happened basically filed for bankruptcy.
The rival, which is named Binance. They went and said, okay,

(16:29):
we'll actually scoop these people up, we'll help them, and
then when they looked at their balance sheet, they said, oh,
never mind, this is like way way worse than we
could ever imagine. We're not buying this company. And so now, apparently,
according to CNBC, in the space of just a couple
of days, FTX went from a thirty two billion dollar
valuation to bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, thirty two billion to bankruptcy. That

(16:55):
is like just totally unacceptable. So it's also really sad
that one of my favorite people Larry David was in
the commercial for them, and the commercial was actually ironic
because now looking back, Larry David apparently, you know, in
the commercial. I remember it briefly in the Super Bowl.
You know, he turned down every time someone asked him

(17:16):
to invest in crypto, and you know, he said no,
and he said, I don't think so, and I'm never
wrong about this stuff, never, And now you know, of
course he was right about it once again, even though
he took money from them. A GameStop apparently had a
partnership with FTX. They sold FTX gift cards. Oh my gosh.
So now if you've got money in this company, you know,

(17:38):
on this platform, I'm not sure what happens. And I'm
not a huge, huge expert in crypto, but I know
there's like this whole thing of like whether you can
have your money on a platform or your money in
your own wallet. And I think it's somewhat safer to
have your money in your own wallet, which is way
more complicated to set up, which is why the average

(17:59):
person pretty much which puts their money on these platforms.
You know, it's it's just easier because they do all
the behind the scenes work of setting up your wallet
and holding the crypto, but when they go out, it's like,
there goes your crypto. And of course this also has
ramifications on the crypto market in general. You know, bitcoin
has had you know, bitcoin has just been really, really

(18:22):
not good for a while now. So if you look
at bitcoin a year to date, down sixty five percent.
Twenty twenty two, bitcoin is down sixty five percent, that
is horrendous. Okay, last six months, been down forty percent.

(18:45):
Five years, it's still up ninety one percent, So that's
it's got that going for it. So maybe we're in
this for the long haul. I mean, you've got to
really stick with bitcoin for a very long time. We'll see.
I mean, I think that the problem with bitcoin is
that it's you know, I think the problem is really governments.
Governments don't want this to work, you know, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal,

(19:09):
like all these companies that you know, banks, Bank of America, Chase,
they don't really want bitcoin to work. Why they've got
their own system that works really well, and they've got
a lock on the financial system. Why would they want
this other thing to come along that could be cheaper,
that could be easier. They don't want this to work.

(19:30):
So when you don't have governments wanting it to work,
when you don't have major banks and financial institutions wanting
it to work, it's not going to work. Not easily now,
maybe because you know, I do believe that tech people
are very smart people, and the people behind this could
be very smart and say, look, we've created a better system.

(19:51):
But is the general population ready for this better system?
When you can't use bitcoin at any major retailer that
I can think of, Amazon, Target, Best Buy, you can't
use bitcoin to purchase at these things. You can't use
bitcoin to buy a flight, you can't use bitcoin to
buy a car. Tesla tried it for a minute, even

(20:13):
Tesla Elon Musk, who you know was huge into crypto,
you can't. Yeah, they took away that functionality. So when
you've got all these things working against it, it's a
tough it's a tough ride for this thing to get
into a place where it's part of everyday lives and
where it can be more legitimate. I'm not saying I
don't like it, like I actually think it's it's kind

(20:33):
of cool. I just don't know if it's at where
people want it to be at. You know, other than
an investment for the last couple of years, and that
investment is not working out very well at this point.
I could be wrong in five years. But also the
functionality of it would be so much better if you could.
You know, I had to pay someone the other day,

(20:54):
and I had to pay them, you know, a little
bit more than I typically pay for things like Venmo
and zel and all that stuff, and it was a
real problem. I mean, just sitting there, you realize the limitations.
You know, like something like a wire transfer right that's
been around forever. It's bank to bank, it's slow, it's bulky,

(21:17):
it's kind of a big deal. You got to fill
out a bunch of stuff. I remember doing it for
when we bought our house. It's just a not a
simple thing to do. And so you think bitcoin you
could send as much as you want instantly to anyone
you want, which is kind of cool but also kind
of scary. But anyway, I saw I quickly saw the
limits of zell and Venmo when I tried to do this,
because you know, if you want to use a credit

(21:38):
card to send on Venmo, they're going to charge you
three percent. If you want to send over a certain
amount on zel. It takes a bunch longer my account
was locked up. I mean, it's a whole thing. So again,
there are many, many kind of things happening in the
financial world that bitcoin could solve, but yet many people
don't want it solved. And so when that's happening again,

(21:59):
you've got lots of forces against you. So FTX will
kind of continue to follow that whole drama, But lots
of drama in the tech world this week. All right,
let's get to the next question. Very simple question from
Gil hey Rich, quick question for you. My wife needs
a new iPhone charger cable. She's asking for a fast

(22:22):
charge cable. Amazon carries off brand cables, but are they
fast charge or do we have to buy the expensive
Apple brand to get a fast charge? Thanks Gil, great question, Gil.
There are so many people out there charging their phones
at the slowest possible speeds for a variety of reasons.
You need a one to two punch to quick charge

(22:44):
your iPhone. And the iPhone, by the way, does not
quick charge. I mean it does only a name, but
compared to most Android phones out there, the iPhone is
still very very slow when it comes to charging. Now,
the good news is that the iPhone battery lasts a
very long time. But it's it's very apparent to me
when I travel or if I'm out on a very

(23:06):
long shoot throughout the day. So let's say I go
to convention, or let's say I go, you know, out
out and about on a vacation. You're out all day,
out of your house all day, or out of your
hotel room all day. Good example, Hawaii, you know you're
out sight seeing, you're hiking, you're taking pictures, you're taking videos.
You come back to your hotel room before dinner, your

(23:27):
phone's at fifteen percent. You say, cool, I'll plug in
while I go take a shower, get cleaned up, ready
for dinner. And you come out in your phones at
thirty five percent. It's like, wait, what shouldn't this thing
be way more charged? So here's the problem. Number one,
if you're using the old brick that you got with
your original iPhone, you got to stop doing that. So
if you're using the original plug in charger for your iPhone,

(23:49):
which is pretty small, it's got a big USB plug
on it. It's basically a five watt charger, and then
you're plugging that into a standard USB cable, you know,
the big one USBA, and then on the other end
of that is lightning. That's going to be the slowest
possible charge. That's really a trickle charge at this point.
For the modern iPhones, I think it's iPhone eight and

(24:10):
up that can handle faster charging. So if you're using
that original brick along with that original cable with the
original USB plugging into it, that's gonna be really slow.
So here's what you need. You need two things. Number one,
you need a lightning to USB C. USBC is that
tiny USB connector that you can flip up and down.

(24:32):
It goes in either way. That's what you need for
your cable. And then you need the plug that goes
into the wall that is USB c as well, and
not just a you know, you need a faster USBC.
Most of them are you know, twenty watts and up.
You need a twenty watt charger or you know, maybe
a thirty watt charger and that will charge your phone fast.

(24:53):
The fastest ones that I found are I like this
one from Spegan. It's like a thirty wat brick and
it's really great and it charges the phone very very fast,
noticeably fast. So those are the two things. Now, do
you need the Apple brand charger? No, you don't. You
can just use any brand that you find on Amazon
that seems legitimate. I like something like a you can

(25:15):
go with Amazon Basics. You can go with a Spegan cable.
You can go with a Belkan cable. You can go
with the you know, whatever cable you want that looks reasonable.
Look for something that has a lot of reviews. Maybe
it says Amazon's choice on there, or just you know,
most popular, something like that. So that's it. When I
was in China, I remember these cables were about a dollar,

(25:36):
and here they sell for twenty thirty bucks for a
nice one, a braided one. But yeah, these things, you know,
I wouldn't go for the super super cheap, like the
dollar you know, the ones that you see at like
the checkout counter at like certain convenience stores or like
a quick you know, quick convenience store. I would maybe
go with something a little bit more high quality. But really,
any of these things will work. But you need that

(25:58):
one two punch of USBC and then USBC cable to
lightning that will get the fastest possible charge for your phone.
All right, let's get to the third biggest tech story
of the week. Meta first time in history, first mass
layoffs in the company's eighteen year history. According to Reuters,

(26:20):
Meta told employees on Friday that eleven thousand jobs would
be cut, thirteen percent of its workforce. And you know
this is not something again news you can use, but
it just goes to show the current state of affair here.
We've seen more tech layoffs in the past couple of
weeks than we've seen in all of the past couple
of years combined. I mean, this is a real indicator

(26:42):
of things are changing with our economy, things are changing
with these companies, that the tech kind of party is over.
People are turning on the lights and realizing that there's
a big mess to clean up. And that mess is
that there's a lot of people that are employed at
these companies, that the growth isn't there anymore, the profits

(27:02):
aren't there anymore, and so they need to kind of
make some changes in a big way. And when you've
got Meta doing this' that's really kind of wild because
these companies are just printing money for the past couple
of years. But we've seen inflation, we've seen prices rise,
we've seen you know, all the revenue of these major
tech companies has been clipped not just by the economy,

(27:26):
but also by changes in the greater ad marketplace. And
a big part of that change is really, you know,
people realizing that their privacy is more important to them,
and things like Apple changing the way the iPhone lets
these big companies like Google and YouTube and Instagram and
Facebook target people and just regular ads. So long story short,

(27:51):
first mass layoffs in the company's eighteen year history. You know,
people aren't at home anymore for work from home, so
there's just a lot of these things that they thought
were going to continue forever. You know, some of these
advancements we saw in kind of work from home and
how people adopted things and all remember the rush on
like webcams and computers and laptops and you know, outfitting

(28:12):
your house. When people had the opportunity to get back
to work, a lot of them did and they kind
of dropped all these things, like you know, I went
from using Zoom every day to using zoom you know,
maybe once every other week. So there's a lot of
big changes there. Two things in this Reuter's article kind
of interesting executives during a town hall meeting with employees,
told told employees that the company was going to exit

(28:35):
its portal smart display business. Those are the the Facebook
kind of branded smart screens. You know, they had something
that would compete with the Echo Show and the Google
Nest Hub. So I guess Facebook is getting rid of those.
I was at the launch event for that, and those
never really took off in a big way because even

(28:56):
though there were really good products, I think that people
didn't like the privacy aspect of, you know, having a
camera and microphone in their home from Facebook. And you know,
it's kind of sad that that is. You know that
that kind of was a quick demise for those products.
They never really took off in a big way. They
weren't so bad, but you know, there you go. And

(29:16):
then they're not going to work on smart watches either.
I don't think Facebook ever came out with a smart
watch that I remember, but I know there's been a
lot of rumors about them coming out with a smart watch,
so I guess that's not happening. But it says the
wind down work on smart watches. So it's kind of
sad that some of these big companies, you know, there's
so many like Facebook went from you know, the the

(29:38):
real tech darling to kind of now they are in
a really tricky place because people just don't trust Facebook
like they used to. They've got a lot of good businesses,
They've done a lot of interesting things. They connect a
lot of people on a daily basis, but people just
don't trust them, and that's a problem. When you have
that sort of major barrier in your relationship with customers,

(30:03):
that's not a good thing and it's going to take
a lot for Facebook to get over that. If they
ever do. I'm not sure they can ever recover from
kind of that whole situation with the you know what
was that company, the Cambridge Analytica, that kind of scandal.
I just don't I don't know, We'll see. I mean,
I think they have a lot of good things going on.

(30:24):
I mean, Instagram has been tricky lately because it's changed
so much to kind of compete with TikTok. Facebook Messenger
is still there, but is that really a big growth
area for the company. Oculus is a huge growth area,
but it's kind of installed the metaverse. You know, they're
spending so much money on trying to make the metaverse
a thing, But is that gonna happen anytime soon. I'm

(30:46):
not sure. There are many many question marks in Meta's future,
and it's gonna be interesting to kind of watch them
work through it. Patricia says, we are being charged sixty
four ninety nine twice a month on the same visa card,
but two different Google accounts since for one twenty twenty two,

(31:11):
with two different email addresses my one my husband and
one myself. I've tried everything to contact them to no
avail the phone number and they give a phone number
is always busy, no answer, please help, and no live
chat in my account. Thank you, Pat in Huntington Beach,
and I believe uh oh, YouTube TV that's what okay.
I was gonna say I knew the price sixty four

(31:32):
ninety nine because I just subscribed. Sounds like YouTube TV.
Uh Pat, You're not going to reach someone at YouTube TV.
You're not gonna any of these things that you subscribe
to online. You know, these new tech forward companies like
a YouTube TV, like a Spotify, you know, any app
that you subscribe to. It's very rare that you will
reach a person to actually cancel these accounts with Now.

(31:55):
The good news is that's the bad news, especially if
you are of a certain general that remembers that you
would subscribe to something and then you'd have to call
in to get rid of it. That doesn't happen anymore.
Ninety nine point nine percent of companies that you subscribe online,
you're able to cancel online. In fact, that is the
way to cancel. Now, there are a few exceptions. You know, gyms,

(32:18):
you still got to you know, you can easily sign
up online, but oh, you got to come in and
you got to fill out paperwork, and you got to
do all this stuff. And the whole point with a
lot of these things that they don't let you cancel online,
like cable companies, let's see what else, a lot of newspapers.
The point is that by the time you finally get
around to canceling, they have squeezed an extra three to

(32:39):
six months out of you. Now you're talking April first,
twenty twenty two. It's now November, So I don't know
if you were trying to cancel since April or if
you've just been charged since April. But I'll give you
a great example. My I'll just I'll leave it at
a family member every time I go home. I would
kind of review my family's subscriptions on their iPhone and

(33:03):
I'd say, hey, family member, you know you're still paying
for Hulu. Oh no, I'm not. I canceled that a
long time ago. People think that when they delete the app,
it cancels. No, it does not. Now on Google Play,
I know when you cancel an app or delete sorry,
when you delete the app, it will say hey, red

(33:24):
flag you know that this does not cancel the subscription,
or it says would you like us to cancel the
subscription as well. I think they do that, so that's good.
On iOS, there's no real indication as far as I know.
Maybe they have changed that in iOS sixteen. Maybe when
you delete something now it says, hey, do you want
to delete the associated subscription? I'm not sure. But I
even know myself, and I find myself to be very

(33:47):
or I believe myself to be pretty tech savvy, and
I will tell you, in the last month or two,
I have fallen victim to this. It's not a scam,
it's just it's very smart and shrewd business price. Let's
put it that way. You know, you subscribe to something,
it's so easy, you sign up, you get thirty days
free and on the thirty first day up, you forget

(34:09):
to cancel. And so now I do use a website
called privacy dot com to help me with one time
credit card numbers, so that even if I forget the
person on the other side, the company is going to
get a decline charge. And so that at least gives
me enough time when I get that decline notice saying,
oh shoot, I forgot to cancel that, let me go

(34:30):
and cancel. And this happened recently with a company, and
you know they actually this was a very very aggressive company.
It was something I subscribed to. It was an airline
thing where you would actually like alert you when the
seat you wanted on the plane would open up. And
so it was like a couple bucks a month I subscribe.
It was like a month free. Well, sure enough, I
forgot to cancel it and on on that first day, boom,

(34:53):
they tried to charge me. I got an email from
privacy dot com saying, oh, we declined this charge. I
got an email from the company saying, oh, you're your
credit cards declined. Please submit a new credit card so
we can you know, make sure you have no laps
in your subscription. And of course I didn't thinking it
would just go away. And I'm not kidding. They tried
that credit card pretty much every day for you know, indefinitely,

(35:16):
maybe a week before I finally emailed the company and said, hey,
I've been getting this charge every single day. Can you
please cancel this completely and please stop charging me? And
they said, oh, okay, no problem, We're sorry, like everything's
been cleared up, and sure enough it went away. So
and don't discount the power of email. By the way,
you can many many times email customer service and they

(35:38):
will take care of a lot of these things for you,
Like if you really can't find a way to cancel something,
you know, send an email. The main thing you have
to watch out for when you call these phone numbers
is that you need to be very careful. There are
many many scams where you google YouTube TV phone number
and the first search result maybe a sponsored scam. Literally,

(35:59):
scam artists will buy ads on Google with that phone
number that seems official or seems you know, or sorry,
not the phone number, but they'll buy a keyword YouTube
TV customer service phone number. They will literally bid for
that keyword their phone number. It'll say call one eight
seven seven whatever. To cancel YouTube TV, you call that

(36:21):
number and that's actually a scam artist on the other end,
or they're trying to sell you something, a bigger subscription, whatever,
So just be very careful calling random numbers. In fact,
it's much safer to cancel online. So to answer your question, Pat,
because I always like to give you a little bit
more more basis for why I tell you the things
that I tell you. You can just go into the YouTube app.

(36:45):
Typically if you're on iOS, sometimes a little trickier because
iOS is so weird about stuff. But if you're on Android,
it'll let you assays sent for my iPad, so I
feel like that's you're probably on iPhone. I would go
to YouTube tv on the desktop up and literally go
into your account, and I guarantee you there's a way
to just cancel your account. Now, if you subscribed through iOS,

(37:08):
it's a different process. If you subscribe through iOS, which
I'm not sure some companies let you, some companies don't.
I'm not sure if YouTube TV lets you subscribe through iOS.
But if you anything that you subscribe through iTunes Store, iOS,
whatever you call iPhone, you can go into your iCloud
and then you go into subscriptions and it will let

(37:30):
me see if that's how you do it. Let me
check this out here, because they changed it recently. I
think they made it easier to find. So you go
into settings, you tap your name at the top or
it says iicloud, and then you go subscriptions and it
will show you all of the subscriptions that you are
currently subscribed to. Many of them have gotten more expensive
in the past couple of months. But what you need

(37:51):
to do is just you can delete any subscription that
you have in there. Just tap it and just say
cancel subscription, and you will be able to cancel that
and typically you'll get to use it throughout the end
of your subscription. Let me actually have YouTube TV on
my iPhone, so let me see if you can cancel
it from the iOS app. I doubt you can, but

(38:13):
let's see. Let's just see for fun. By the way,
YouTube TV is so good. I mean it's really really slick. Okay, Settings,
Oh wow, refer a friend, get forty five dollars. That's
quite impressive. All right, Settings, Okay, membership Nope, base plan.
Please go to YouTube tv on the web to manage

(38:35):
your account. So yep, you gotta do that, So just
go to the YouTube TV on the website and literally
go to your account press cancel. You should be able
to take care of that. No problem. All right, let's
get to the next story of the week. What do
we want to talk about. Let's talk about Gmail. Gmail
is getting a handy feature just in time for the holidays.

(38:57):
It will help you track your orders placed in order today.
I don't think my wife listens to this podcast, so
I'll tell you what I got, But I got her
a pair I am. I'll just be quite honest. I
am the worst gift giver in the world. I really
am horrible at giving gifts. My wife is amazing at
giving gifts. And there are some people that are just

(39:19):
really thoughtful gift givers. My wife's mom my mother in
law is also and my mom are very thoughtful gift givers.
You know, there's two types of gift givers, right There
are the people that just listen in everyday conversations for
any clue as to what you might need in your life,
and when they hear that, they lock it in their

(39:40):
brain and they go rich needs a new belt. Next
time there's a holiday, you have a brand new belt.
That's amazing. There are other people that do this, Hey,
what is your kid like these days? What do you need? Rich?
Is there anything you could use? And they do their
gift giving like that. It's almost like a last minute thing.

(40:02):
Then there are people like myself who are just completely
clueless and I just go to the mall looking for
ideas of what to buy. Oh, perfume, that's a gift
that a lot of people give during the holidays. Let
me give her that. It's terrible. It's a terrible way
to give gifts. So I don't know if you can

(40:23):
change that about yourself. Maybe you could be a little
bit more thoughtful and write things down. That's what I've
tried to start doing. So when I hear a family
member or a friend, or my wife or my kids
say that they want something, I'm like, oh, a little
bell goes off, and I kind of try to write
it down. So anyway, my wife has needed new slippers

(40:44):
since last Christmas when we bought slippers for each other
and she got a hole in it immediately, like her
toe popped out of it. Like the first day. We
should have returned these things. Actually we probably still can.
They're wellbean now, that I think about it, why not
a new pair? Anyway, So today I got a thing
like one of those catalogs from Llban in the mail,

(41:06):
and I had a fifteen percent off discount, and I said, oh,
I am buying It's my first gift of the season.
I am purchasing it right now. And so I went
to my computer. I purchased a slippers, which, by the way,
LLBean slippers. How in the world are they ninety dollars?
I don't know, but I think they're pretty good. I mean,
I have a pair might have lasted many years, so

(41:27):
I guess maybe they are worth ninety bucks. But I
bought them. And anyway, so I was very proud of
myself because this is a gift that I know she
needs and I know she wants, and it'll probably be
something she buys for herself by Christmas, but I may
even give it to her early because just to make
sure that she doesn't get it for herself. Anyway, I
tell you that story because this will be a very

(41:49):
handy feature inside Google, probably be the first time I'll
use this. Where now, if you get in order with
a tracking number, Gmail will display that status of that
tracking number right in your inbox. So for instance, my
LLB and email will say congrats, your order has shipped,
and right underneath it'll say arriving you know, November twenty second,

(42:10):
and you'll see that live updates. So what they're doing
is they're looking in that email, they're seeing the tracking number,
they're going out, they're requesting the tracking information from the carrier,
and then they're putting that data in the email and
they'll probably update that, you know, in live time, so
you always see, you know, if there's a delay or whatever.
And in fact, they say if there is a delay,
they will actually bring that email back to the top

(42:32):
of your inbox with the word you know, delayed, and
so that's kind of cool. It'll also say label created
arriving tomorrow, delivered today. So it's just very handy. It's
very simple. It's a very it's a very basic thing,
but pretty handy. Now. I think there's gonna be one
big exception because this says it works with all the
major US shipping carriers. I don't think that Amazon actually

(42:57):
puts shipping numbers in their orders. Let me see. I
don't think they do. So let's see Amazon your Amazon order.
Here we go, here's an Amazon order, and yeah, it
does not give a tracking number. It gives an order
and in fact, it doesn't even tell you, by the way,

(43:18):
what you order on Amazon. And the reason they do that,
and again I'll just give you a little background. The
reason why Amazon does not put items that you order
in your email is because they've gotten hip to so
many of these scraper companies that scrape your email inbox.
You sign up with a company like I think it's
like Raccoton or whatever however you say that name, but

(43:39):
what they do is a big part of their business
is like scraping your inbox. I don't know, maybe it's
not Rakoton, whatever, but there are companies when you grant
them access to your email, which you need to be
very careful about, they will scrape your inbox for different things.
But part of their business is kind of selling the
data of the stuff that you buy, the stuff that
you order, how much things can costs. So there's a

(44:01):
lot of intelligence companies out there that do this and
it's not a dirty thing. It's it's a business. But
you know, you're getting a business, you're getting a product,
but they're getting information, they're getting data, and so That's
why Amazon doesn't do this, because they've gotten hip to
this and they say, you know what, we're just gonna
mess with like, you know, we're the biggest retailer out there,
biggest online, probably the biggest retailer in general, and we're

(44:24):
just gonna mess with everyone. We're just gonna not put
tracking information in your email. And we're also not gonna
put order information in your email because we just don't
want you know, these scraping companies. You know, if they
notice that number one, they can use the data and say, oh,
a million people order this product today, or we noticed
there is a big price drop, or we notice that

(44:45):
the price generally goes up on this product around November.
So there's a lot of different reasons why Amazon doesn't
want this order information in their emails. Being the biggest
retailer out there anyway, ninety nine point nine percent of
other re tailors, when you order something, puts the package
information in there, the tracking number, and also what you ordered.

(45:05):
So cool, cool new feature by Gmail that you can get.
It's rolling out, so you may not have it immediately.
I don't have it just yet, but it just came
out this week, so you should have it soon. All right,
let's get to the next question of the podcast. All right,

(45:29):
Apple TV four K first generation versus third generation. Paul says,
I love your show and I listen every week on overcast.
Oh that's a great app to listen to. Overcast is
a fantastic podcast app. It's only on iOS, but it's
it's very thoughtfully designed. I think I think it's Marco

(45:50):
ament m A R C O A, M and T overcast. Yeah,
it is so. Marco ament is a is a pretty
prominent developer and very very sort of in sort of
the iOS like Apple, you know, very what's the word
I'm looking for. He doesn't just do stuff like he's

(46:13):
very thoughtful about the design of certain things. And that's
why overcast is a real good kind of you know,
it's a it's a really slick podcast player, probably the
best or one of the best that you know anyway.
So he's a very prominent, uh you know, iOS developer.
Follow him on social media and you know, you can
kind of see what, you know, what he's up to.

(46:35):
But he you know, I think it's just is it
just overcast? He doesn't even say what he does interesting anyway. Okay,
so what is the question. Okay, love your show listen
every week in overcast. I currently have a first generation
Apple TV four K with the A ten chip and
it's used for streaming videos and Apple Arcade games by
the grand kids. In your estimation, what upgrading to the

(46:58):
third generation Apple TV with the A teen chip bring
a noticeable performance improvement? The first gen is starting to
lag a little but still does the job. Okay, thinking
more of future proof for iOS upgrade or OS upgrades
and head off price increases. Thanks for your help. Paul
in Columbus, Indiana. Paul, Yes, I've been testing the Apple

(47:18):
TV third generation and I will tell you that it is.
Look I was using the second generation and I'll tell
you that. Can I tell a big difference. No? Is
it improved? Yes? Do the apps load a little bit faster?
I'm not sure. Actually, this weekend I'm going to be
testing the second generation versus the third generation, and we're

(47:42):
going to open up I told my son we need
to get the stop Watch out. So what we're gonna
do is we're going to open up a couple of apps,
like the popular apps like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, you know,
close them all out and then open them up and
see how long they take to load. Now, there is
one defining factor. You know, people really are not very
discerning when it comes to a streaming device. They just

(48:02):
think like, oh, you buy the cheapest Fire TV stick
or you know, whatever's cheap, you know, a cheap rocou stick.
But what they don't realize is that they are really
slow when it comes to opening up the apps. And
maybe it's not a big deal, you know, it's not
something that you notice, but I notice as a reviewer
when I test various devices for streaming, there is a

(48:24):
big difference in how long it takes different devices to
open up these apps. A Netflix app, you know those
little like intros they have on Netflix. You know, that
little thing might linger for like five, six, seven seconds
on some of these like really substandard and slow devices,
whereas on a brand new device like the Apple TV

(48:45):
four K third generation, it's super duper fast and it
just happens instantly. So anyway, this weekend, I'm going to
do a little speed test Where'm going to open up
a couple of these apps and then open up a
couple of popular games on Arcade and just see how
long it takes to load. I'm assuming the difference is
only going to be a matter of seconds from the
second to the third. I think on the first of
the third there will be a noticeable difference, especially if

(49:07):
you're saying it's starting to lack. The other main thing
that is changed on the Apple TV third generation is
the remote control. So the remote control on the Apple
TV the new one is that the remote control is
now USB C and so that's the big thing with that.

(49:31):
And then it's also got more base storage. It's got
two versions. You've got an Ethernet version and you've got
a Wi Fi version. The Ethernet version has support for
what's called Matter. So if you're doing anything with smart
home in the near future, I would definitely go with
the Ethernet version because Matter is this new standard for
home interconnectivity where all of the smart home stuff is

(49:54):
going to work together no matter what brand it is,
which is it's a pretty big deal actually, So Apple
the new Apple TV, the high end one, the Ethernet
one has that built in, which is, you know, it's
not that much more than the other one. I think
it's like twenty more dollars or something, so go with that,
and then it's faster. There's no fan on it. It's
a little bit smaller, and you know, Apple says it's

(50:16):
twenty percent less in volume side by side. You know,
I showed it to my kids. They didn't really notice,
Like what's the difference? I said, I know, but the
remote has USB C and so maybe it's easier to charge,
you know, as Apple makes that move to USBC with everything.
And also Apple says it consumes thirty percent less power.
I'm not sure if I said that or not. Anyway,

(50:37):
so that is the main difference is for Apple TV
four K. But should you upgrade? I mean, look, do
you need to upgrade today? Probably? Not. What I would
do if I were you is I would set a
price alert on the Apple TV four K third generation,
and I guarantee you over the holidays here there is
going to be some sort of that you can get,

(51:01):
not from Apple. I don't think it's gonna go on
sale from Apple, but I would do. What I would
do is set either a Google alert on news and
I would do like Apple TV four k deal and
just make sure that you're getting the you know, the

(51:21):
newest model. Because a lot of times, because Apple products
in particular are kind of tricky and they all look
the same, and they all don't have this, they all
have the same name, and it's all about a generation,
which I really don't like. It could be very tricky
for purchasing. So a lot of these Black Friday and
Holiday deals are going to be for the last generation
of Apple products, not the current generation. But sometimes you

(51:44):
will find some sort of special off or whatever for
the current generation. And that may happen with the Apple
TV four K, because you know, they want to move
these things, they want to sell them, and so you
know retailers like a best Buy might do it. Apple
may not do it, but best Buy might or Amazon
someone like that. So you can set up a Google
search for Apple TV four K deal in the news

(52:04):
and bloggers will always blog about deals, and so you
can do that. Or you can go to slick deals,
set a set an alert for Apple TV. You know,
there's various ways of doing it, so just just or
you can even go to a website and use like honey,
put it on your watch list and see if the
price goes down. Let's see if the if it's going
if its Apple TV four K twenty twenty two, let's

(52:28):
see if the new one. Uh yeah, so look at this,
it's already a couple bucks off. So the Apple TV
four k uh, it's yeah, so it's already five dollars off.
So there you go. Oh whoops, wrong one. There you
go five bucks. I just saved you five dollars. Okay,

(52:48):
so there you go. All right, Uh, let's see what
are we doing. Let's get to another story here. Okay,
let's talk about Windows eleven. So I told you earlier
that I've been playing with when on the laptop and
it's pretty cool. The feature that I was playing with
today is the iCloud integration. So there's always been some

(53:09):
level of iCloud integration on Windows, but now it's gotten
a lot better because I tested this couple weeks ago
at the event, but now I got to try it
for myself. And basically, if you log into iCloud on Windows,
you have to have the iCloud app downloaded, and then
the newest version of Windows software, which is Windows eleven,
and the newest version of their Photos software. Now your

(53:31):
pictures from iCloud will show up inside the Photos app
on Windows. That is pretty cool because it makes it
easy to manage. It will show up with all your
other pictures they're designated. You can kind of look at
just your iCloud photos. You can look at all your
photos across various services. It's just this nice, kind of
like consolidated place where you can see many of your photos.

(53:55):
I say many because I'm not sure that Google Photos
is part of that situation. Google Photos is really really
bugging me because they have made themselves such a silo
and it's so tough to like manage Google Photos from
any other app or any other thing except Google Photos.
And maybe Google has a good reason for this, but
it's really annoying to me because I've talked about this before.

(54:15):
But I want to back up my entire collection somehow,
and as far as I know, there is no easy
way to do that. Google Photos. You need to be
able to sync to a hard drive. Give me a
WiFi hard drive. I don't care if you sell it, Google.
I want to be able to plug it in to
my house, connect it to Wi Fi, and say, continuously
sync my entire Google Photos collection to this hard drive.

(54:38):
Please give me that feature, Google Photos. It is a
million dollar feature. It is You'll sell millions of hard drives.
It'll be peace of mind for people to have a backup,
a local backup of your photo collection in case anything
ever goes wrong with Google Photos. Believe me, it'd be
very very nice. Anyway, Windows eleven, if you want to
try this, just update the Photos app on Windows eleven,

(55:00):
make sure all your apps on Windows or your your
software on Windows eleven is updated, and then basically just
log in and click sync iphot iCloud photos on the
iCloud app and boom, all of your photos will start
to show up in the app. And it's a two
way sink, so if you delete something from the photos app,
it's going to delete off your iCloud. And it's actually

(55:22):
kind of cool because I went in there. I don't
use iCloud for photos, but I went in and found
a whole bunch of old photos that were lingering, and
I went in and deleted those. I copied them over
to Google Photos and then I deleted them. So it
was kind of a nice little housekeeping thing. Kind of cool.
But again another another way, I'm impressed with Windows. And
you know, these these tech companies, they could either choose
to be silos for everything, or they can choose to

(55:43):
kind of be helpful to the consumer and actually do
things that are helpful for us, and that's always nice,
and it always surprises me when they actually do that. Okay, uh,
let's see what else? What else? What else? Let's do
this one? Oh, another question here. I got two more

(56:06):
things before I close out the show. Here Instagram. John says,
I have an iPad and I lost access to my
Instagram account. They asked for a phone number, gave them that.
Now they want me to write my name on a
piece of paper and take a photo of my face
and send it to them. Do you think this is safe?
Thanks for any help or advice on this matter. Sent
from my iPad. Yes, John, as long as this is

(56:27):
Instagram doing this. This is a major major issue. The
amount of emails I get from people that have had
their Instagram account hacked or their Facebook account hacked is incredible.
It happens. I'm not kidding. I get a dozen emails
a week just on this topic. And it's gotten so
bad where I really feel bad for the people that
are emailing me. But also, hackers are not necessarily hacking

(56:52):
your account. What they're doing is they're just running scripts
that find your password that you've reused a thousand times
on a different website. And they run it on Instagram
and boom it lets them in, and so you don't
have two factor authentication turned on. And that's the big problem.
Got to turn on two factor authentication. Now, there are
a million other ways that hackers can get in, but
nobody is like trying to like, you know, get into

(57:14):
your Instagram account to like take it over so that
they can tweet things from your account or you know,
Instagram things from your account. It's an automated thing. It's
because eventually they might try to hit up your followers
to scam them, and that's really what they're doing. The way,
you know, and the other way that they get in
is for you actually handing over your password. So I've

(57:35):
had people tell me stories where they will literally either
log into a text message that says, hey, your Instagram
account is uh is that risk? Please log in to
confirm this was you, and they quickly log in and oh,
that's a mistake because the website was a phishing website,
or someone texts them something and says, hey, I need help,
can you please just some of your password? And people

(57:55):
actually do it. Believe me, they actually do this stuff.
So John Facebook, you know, I feel for them. In
a little bit because they have to figure out ways
of like verifying who people are. And a lot of
times they'll ask you to hold up, you know, a
newspaper with a date on it, or a picture, or
a phone number or an ID or some sort of

(58:16):
supporting information. It's really kind of wild sometimes. But I've
had people tell me this personally that have gotten access
to their account again, So yes, they do. They do
that for sure, So do what they ask. But you know,
just be careful because you don't, you know, you want
to be careful about what you do. All right, All right,
let's get to the final story, because I tease this one,

(58:39):
Spotify might finally work properly on the Apple Watch. Now.
I am no longer a subscriber to Spotify. I've actually
switched over to a combination of Apple Music and YouTube
Music and now Amazon Music because they gave all the
songs away for free, even though you have to shuffle them,

(59:01):
which is fine for my so nos, you know, it's
totally fine. And don't listen to specific music when I
come home. I just listened to like a playlist, so
I've been I've been almost exclusively listening to Amazon Music,
not I mean, I subscribed to other things I pay for,
so I should probably use those. But I just kind
of like the playlist. They're basic, they're simple. I've got
this like relaxing, you know, modern country that's just like

(59:22):
a nice playlist when I come home. It's got easy
listening songs. I like it. You know, call me old
fashioned whatever. Anyway, I say that all because I got
rid of Spotify, because you know, why pay for another thing.
Even though I really really liked it. I was very
impressed with Spotify. I think it's probably the best music
service out there overall, but I just, you know, I
can't justify paying for it when I've got two more

(59:44):
that I'm paying for three more if you count Amazon. Anyway, Spotify,
the one thing that bugged me about it is that
it never properly worked on the Apple Watch. I mean,
I'm talking horrible, really really bad. I was basically I
was able to download offline music. You know. My whole
thing is that, you know, I have an Apple Watch
with cellular, which, by the way, never works. The cellular.

(01:00:05):
I don't know if I live in an area with
a bad signal, but the cellular on my Apple Watch
never works. It's really annoying. Like I go anywhere and
I think, oh, my watch is gonna work. No, it
just doesn't. So I've gotten to the point where I
don't leave the house without my phone because I can't.
I need my phone with me because the cellular on
my Apple Watch is like never guaranteed to work. I
don't know why, but it's just it's just really really

(01:00:28):
hit or miss. So with Spotify, you know, I thought
maybe you could stream music when you're out and about
which you might be able to, but I've never gotten
that to work because again the cellular thing. So I
downloaded music for offline listening, but there's so many restrictions
on the Apple Watch and iOS and how the architecture
of this that basically your phone and your watch never

(01:00:49):
have a chance to download the offline music because like
it never triggers it. Like Apple Music. Oh fine, because
everything with Apple just seems to work so easily, like
Apple Music never had a problem. You say, hey, download
this playlist to my Apple Watch, and the next time
you charge your Apple Watch, it's there. Spotify that never
seems to work. I think it's because you have to

(01:01:10):
like open the apps, go to deep sleep, you know,
the third party apps, and so Spotify just goes to
deep sleep and it forgets to actually upload or offline
you know, get that music. So anyway, now that's all
behind us, because Spotify says they have a new and
improved listening experience on Apple Watch. You can more easily
browse and choose your favorite music and podcasts, and more

(01:01:33):
quickly download music to listen offline from the watch itself.
There's larger artwork, animations, and added functionality like swiping to
like a song. There you go. That is welcome. So
if you have an Apple Watch and you haven't used
Spotify in a while because it's just been the worst
experience in the world, go ahead give it another spin.
Because this is what's so wild to people like me

(01:01:54):
that test stuff for a living. I never know if
I'm crazy and just like totally not really understanding this
stuff or doing something wrong, or if there's actually a
problem with it until something like this comes out and
this is your going on like two years or a
year after Spotify has been on the Apple Watch for
me to say, oh, I was right, it never really
worked properly. Did I go off enough on this show?

(01:02:15):
That's gonna do it? For this episode. If you'd like
to spend a question for me to answer, go to
my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech,
hit the big blue send email button, or go to
Richontech dot tv and hit the email icon. I would
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Go to the listening app of your choice. Write a
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help other people understand why they should listen. You can

(01:02:36):
follow me on social media. I am at rich on
Tech and no matter where you live in the US,
download the free KTLA plus app on Apple, TV, fireTV,
and Roku. Once you do, scroll to the tech section
and watch all of my TV segments on demand. My
name is rich Demiro. I have not given up on
Twitter just yet. Thanks so much for listening. There are
so many ways you can spend an hour of your time.
I do appreciate you spending it with me. I'll talk

(01:02:59):
to you real soon. Tutan Tuta, Tuta, Tuta, Tuta tutt
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