Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to Examining a technology focused podcast that dives deep.
I'm Eric Christiansen.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: And I'm Chris Hans.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: And welcome to another episode of Examining the technology focused podcast that dives deep. I am Erik Christiansen and I am here with my co host, Chris Hans. Chris, good morning to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Good morning.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: So we have quite a bit to talk about today. We kind of have another.
It seems that we can't really get away from AI. I keep trying to find cool stuff that's not AI and it's increasingly difficult in the news cycle. But we do have some interesting things to talk about because the Consumer Electronics Show CES happened and there was some really interesting kind of tech. Some of it's product, you know, just phones and laptops, but some of it's AI, but some of it's, excuse me, kind of education related.
So that's pretty cool. But I think we were going to kick off maybe with some of the AI related stuff. So who wants to get started today with our tech news? Is there anything in particular that you wanted to talk about first?
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Well, I think the first thing that we there was Microsoft that came out with a report, their AI Diffusion report.
And this talks about the adoption and inequity. So basically adoption is up, but the inequality is widening across various nations and so on.
But yeah, it's a long report, there's a lot to cover in there.
But there were some kind of interesting little tidbits that we found. Like for instance, some of the countries we were just looking at where the United Arab Emirates was high up there.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I had remembered originally that UAE or maybe Saudi Arabia, one of the, one of the countries I, I should, I didn't look this up before, but they were, they were going to try to make some of the more premium AI stuff available to all their citizens in their countries.
It sounds like that is somewhat the case, if I'm understanding this correctly, regarding South Korea.
So South Korea has a national AI Strategy committee and they passed the Basic AI Act. I haven't read the Basic AI act, but I think they've really expanded it to education in schools.
And so it seems like a lot of the countries in developing countries and the countries in the global south have really, especially the ones that are richer, have really championed kind of universal access.
And I was wondering if that's part of the reason that you see such a strange divide. So for instance, if you look at AI access by percentage of the population or AI usage, I should say everybody technically has Access.
It's like 28% for the US which is ranked as 24, but then places like Norway with 46, Singapore 60, UAE is 64%. And I'm wondering if that's, it'd be interesting to know how you measure that.
So if you roll out AI to everybody and there's kind of a national strategy, everyone gets a basic level that they have access to, whether it be in schools, that's going to bump those numbers up. So I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that it's interesting, but it also doesn't measure how it's used.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Or if it's used for innovation rather than just like as, you know, like rolling out Microsoft Office or Google Workspace.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Right, yeah, well, and that's where like, I mean, you bring up a good point like diffusion is an innovation.
So this report. Yeah, really what it's a reminder is that being great at building AI and being a great at getting your population to use it are two different, you know, national capabilities.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: I suppose in the long run there's an argument to be made for rolling it out to a lot of people.
If you, you know, if, if there's a, if it's true that people have to have some degree of AI literacy to, to remain competitive in the workforce, then you know, a much larger percentage of your workplace is competitive. And we know that huge wealth disparities can cause like a lot of problems over time. Right.
So that might be what those countries are thinking, especially given their history of broad medical coverage and things like that. That's not something the United States is known for.
I actually forgot Canada ranks at 13 on the list. So we're at 33.5% AI diffusion over time.
So we're kind of in the same ballpark as a lot of the other western countries like Netherlands, uk, Belgium, Switzerland were kind of all the same.
But interesting to me that other countries like the United States, Germany, places especially that are known for being.
Kind of industrial hubs are quite low.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and then I think with the report, the other thing too is if you look at some of the, what we can pull out, but it explicitly calls out like early investment in digital infrastructure, skilling and government adoption. So this is a recurring pattern amongst the leaders.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really interesting.
And then it also, like, of course you see the adoption of things like Deep Seq, which is the open source Chinese platform under the MIT license, you know, their highest adoption rate. You see that in China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Belarus, other places in the global South.
So they're going to rely more on probably it seems like less US centric AI models, at least so far because of cost and access. Right.
So in that way, open source again, it's an interesting trend to me because you know, open source runs the whole Internet. Like the infrastructure is all Linux based, everything's open source. I wonder if that will be the same with AI in the long run. A lot of the infrastructural AI will be open source open models just because it's a, you know, more accessible, scalable, that kind of a thing.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a big open source fan. So.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: We talked about that in the last episode too.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Did we? Actually it's been a while. This is our first one in the new year, so I have forgotten.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Well, you talked about the Open. What is it?
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Olama. Oh yeah, I use that all the time. That's been terrific.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I've had a bunch of people even like say like, you know, cause they were, they're like, you know, I don't know if this. These large language models and not being able to do things locally and so I've been telling people to listen to that, that episode and try experimenting with some of those tools.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I've been really impressed with it. I mean, it's not going to hit. You're not going to be able to do deep research. I mean some of them will do image generation. If you have a computer with memory that you could do like a model for that really I've just been using Ollama as the interface. You can use it in the terminal command or install the GUI interface. And then I've been using Meta's, open Source LLM, Llama.
But there's others too. There's Mistral. I mean there's lots of them. I haven't tested them. I've played with one extensively. I tend to play with one tool a lot before I move on to the next. Just you and I were talking about that before the show. We were chatgpt plus heavy users. I was really trying to get Mast mastery and only recently have I kind of directed all my attention to Claude and Anthropics Claude.
But yeah, they work really well, especially for summarizing documents, you know, brainstorming, all the basic stuff that you would do. It's probably good enough.
And yeah, you're not. You don't have to worry about it going up to the cloud.
My ultimate open source project is because I, of course I wrote a blog post and then did a kind of a solo episode a while back about Zorin, which is A distribution of Linux that is designed to be customized so it can look a lot like Windows or the Mac. And in fact with Windows 10 was going out of support they're really ramping up their advertising.
It's an open source operating system but there is a pro version where that gives you more themes and stuff and that's how they make money.
But the operating system is free. And so basically I have a Linux OS that looks on a Mac that looks just like Windows 10, which is great and I need, I should put Ollama on that and then I would have an open source LLM locally running on Linux and then I could just, you know, live my open source life.
But I, I don't use everything open source. As much as Cory doctor tries to convince me, I really try but I haven't got quite there yet.
Yeah, that's an interesting report. I mean we'll link to it in the show notes. It also shows kind of the jump by the way, just before we go the jump in diffusion over time. And so it is interesting. Canada did make a decent jump like one and a half percent or something within 2025, so from I think the first half to the second.
But other countries have much larger jump, South Korea being the biggest in terms of broader uptake. So it's an interesting perspective.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Yeah. There was one thing that I, I would, one thing I would say though like when you're going through this report is that using a generative AI product doesn't necessarily mean that you used it meaningful or. Well, yeah, at work or school. So just keep that in mind.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's hard. This is like a huge study. So this is not deep. This is at the very high level.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: And you know I, you know they tried, I mean they note that the diffusion metric they based on aggregated anonymized telemetry and adjusted for market share and Internet penetration and population and they admit no single metric is perfect. But you know, this telemetry may under count usage. That's happening in unofficial channels, shared devices and like we just talked about, there could be offline or on device tools as well.
Right. So. And something to kind of think about if AI is becoming basic literacy.
Maybe we're watching a, a whole new kind of inequity where opportunity is following this prompt access the way it followed before with the broadband access.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
Should we move on to ces? Is that our next one?
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: I think that's kind of the big thing we want to talk about today. So every year there is the consumer Electronics Show. I'm trying to think of when this was. Was this in January or is it still going on? I originally thought CES was in the summer, but maybe it's in January. It always has been.
But CES is the Consumer Electronics Show. It's been around forever.
The iPhone, the original iPhone, was, was famously originally announced during ces and it just took all the oxygen out of the room and nobody cared about ces. But this, you know, the Consumer Electronics show has gone through its ups and downs.
It used to just be like crazy junk that was included and, and, and then a bunch of vendors dropped out. But I think it's made a real comeback. You see a lot of concepts at CES as well as products that are going to be available on market, which I think it's interesting.
And so, I mean, there's tons of things, audio equipment, we've tried, you know, Chris and I, we went through it.
There's a great overview article from cnet, like the best tech. I mean, there's thousands of things at ces, right? So we tried to pick a few things that we thought would be kind of more interesting to the audience that we listen to. Again, a lot of educators, people in industry, productivity people listen to this.
We tend, you and I tend to focus on application and where is it going to be used, I think is what our focus is. So we tried to pick the tech that is the most interesting. Perhaps the first one that we can talk about is Pebble.
So pebble, the Pebble Watch was an E Ink watch, I think 2012, 2013, it was a long time ago. They originally came out, they were like the first popular smartwatch and it launched on a Kickstarter campaign and then they kind of disappeared. They were actually bought by Fitbit or Google or maybe they were bought by Fitbit and Fitbit was bought by Google.
Either way, I think originally, all of the stuff, if it was not open sourced, it might be.
But the pebble original founders, I think, or at least one of them kind of restarted the company. And it's interesting because they're smartwatches, they're quite affordable. They are cross platform. So unlike the Apple Watch or the Pixel Watch or something like that Android, where you're not locked into a particular phone operating system, there's a little bit more that you can do using it ON Android than iOS, but there's like basically a companion app and that connects to the Watch. So they announced a couple of things at ces.
They brought back around Watch. So a round smartwatch with an E Ink display.
You know, these are pretty bare bones. You can design your own watch faces. There's like an interface, open source way you can do that. You can download them from the community.
The one thing that was great about the pebble watch though is the battery life, you know, up to a month.
Right. So I mean I'm lucky to get two days out of an Apple Watch. And an Apple Watch is far more powerful, much more complicated. But these do basic, you know, heart rate fitness. You're not going to get cutting edge stuff. But as a E Ink Display watch, you're actually getting quite a bit. And so they came out with a round version. But I think what you and I are most interested in, Chris, was this, this pebble index. So what is that?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so the, the ring. So, you know, I, I think this is where it's, you know, look, we started off talking about AI and I feel like maybe part of the theme this year with the CES is that AI has stopped being just a feature and it actually becomes a bit of a wrapper. And so at least with the CES now we're seeing what's actually being shipped and what adoption may look like in embedded devices.
And so with this ring, it's a, the ring is a one job device. It has a button on there and it records a thought and then it's saved and transcribed into the pebble app. And so, you know, cost wise they're looking at $75, which is cheap US.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Which is pretty inexpensive.
Yeah.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: There is no subscription.
It's designed for privacy first defaults, whatever that means.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: We don't know the details.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But again, you know, this is wearable AI without hype. There's external memory rather than the AI companion. You know, this is a lot of people that, they don't want a coach, they want just frictionless capture tool. The battery philosophy, again, like, you know, kind of like what you're talking about with the watch, but it's unusual. They're aiming for multi year life and then you can.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Like degradation of the battery up to two years of usage. And it said 12 to 15 hours of recording total life. Or like how does it work? How do you charge it?
[00:17:06] Speaker B: I. I'm not sure.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Like, yeah.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Oh, it says it can't be charged.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: I don't think it can.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Oh, I see.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: It's going to last.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: It uses an index silver oxide battery.
They said you'd probably lose the charger before the battery runs out. That's so funny. Adding a charge Circuitry, including a charger, makes the project larger, product larger. So that's how. My question was that how do they get all this stuff inside a ring? Because I know there's the Oura ring, which is like a fitness ring.
That's pretty cool, but so interesting. So you don't charge it, and then when it's dead, you just send it back to them and they recycle it.
Exactly. That's kind of ex. Well, okay, so let's say it's $100 Canadian, so it costs $50 a year. So there's no subscription, but you basically have a hardware subscription.
Yeah.
Interesting. I mean, I guess if they're willing to recycle it in an ethical way, then it's okay. But I do worry about, like, you know, how much can they really recycle. Right.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Well, I mean, that's for anything.
You know, I look at it. I just recently, I mean, I told you about this. I got a new Apple watch, and my previous one basically is. It's toast.
And even Apple won't give me anything for it. I could try to go and sell it on Marketplace or something, but the battery itself, to replace it would be $139 Canadian.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Is it series four, series five? And so does it run the latest OS?
[00:18:37] Speaker B: I don't think so, because I don't. I didn't see the.
Like this. What is it?
[00:18:42] Speaker A: The glass, can your daughter wear stuff?
[00:18:46] Speaker B: I mean, it's kind of big, but maybe.
But anyways, at the end of it, like, it's.
I. I think it's. I don't know. I mean, one, one thing, when I saw this, I wonder if the next wave of wearables is less about these health metrics and it's more about kind of cognitive scaffolding where you're capturing, recalling, acting on your intent that you had.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Well, you make a good point. So I was preparing for something recently and I needed some presentation I had to give.
And I like to prepare questions ahead of time that people are going to ask.
And so what I did was, is that I had brainstormed that I wrote out all my notes and what I thought the answers would be and examples into a Microsoft Word document. And then what I did was I uploaded that document to ChatGPT and I put it on voice mode and I just said, I want you to ask me questions about this document as if it was happening during the presentation day. So the equivalent of having somebody ask me questions if I recruited my wife to do it or something.
Um, but it, but it but, you know, it has no time constraints. I don't need to involve someone else, I don't need to schedule it. And I said, you know, I want you to be ultra critical. Don't focus on, you know, focus on positives, but really focus on where I can answer them better if it's too long. And I would just go back and forth. You can go back and forth for an hour before you run the. Hit the limit.
That's a long time to talk to a robot.
And so it's frictionless in the sense that.
It's just. I don't have to type, I don't have to craft, I can just talk.
Yeah.
And so maybe this is kind of like that, but more private, perhaps more. And you know, I do this a lot. Like, it's so funny, you know, I'm thinking back to the original Siri announcement in 2011 and everyone talks about Siri and you know, Google Assistant was supposed to be amazing. All these things just look like they're written in crayon compared to what the current AIs can do.
But you know what I use Siri for? That works really well. There's three things.
Create a new note called this and say this and it'll just save it in the default folder, which is called Notes in Apple Notes.
Set a timer, works every time. Or set a countdown or do something like that and remind me to do the following and reminders and it'll remind me at a certain time.
I have my location set up in my contacts so it knows where home and work and a few other places are. And so it's set up a geofence. So I say, ah, I have to do that when I get to work right away. Remind me to email Joe about his class when I get to work. And the second I walk into that area, I'll get that notification. It works every time.
And that is frictionless to me. I mean, and then I don't use. There's other things. What's the weather going to be like? You know, I asked Siri maybe half a dozen questions at most or commands, but they all work really well.
And this is of course a little bit better than that because it does the transcription better and a few things. But I do sometimes think about what we have already isn't so bad.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, look at like these pebble devices. They're not really competing with, let's say like an Apple Watch, which is more focused on health. Right. So it's, it's competing with a Feeling where it's like, you know, less guilt, less distraction, more usefulness. And so their, their strategy, they're creating this differentiation wedge where it's more about being calm and having community and longevity as opposed to, you know, some sort of feature. Yeah, a whole bunch of features.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: It's a great idea. I'm tempted to pre order this. Which should we do it?
[00:22:59] Speaker B: I. I don't know. I'm not a really jewelry kind of person. But you know, if you wanted to give it a go. I mean, I've even thought about that aura watch. But again, it's.
Yeah. Or not. Yeah, the ring. Sorry. But.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: But I wear my Apple watch and then it does sleep tracking. It's great. So I mean, I don't. This is the thing though, right? Like if I have the Apple watch, is this, is this going to.
I mean, I guess you can dict. How long can you dictate into this ring for?
On average, I use it 10 to 20 times per day. This is in the FAQ and I record three to six. Second thoughts.
But what can I dictate into this that would be better than talking into the watch or asking my phone directly?
I mean, I understand that it's not, it's less of a description, but I'm not going to stop wearing the watch and have just this. Right.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm looking it up right now to see how much you can.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: It's a really cool idea.
Yeah, I'm tempted.
It's another hundred dollars. I think the thing for me is that it's a throwaway device so I can only use it for like a year or two.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse.
It's a cool idea. I like the black one.
We can get different colors. Oh, we can get gold with navy blue. Wow.
Wow.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So it depends on what you mean by how much. So it's per note being offline, there's the rings, battery, so there's no restriction. But you know, the common. What they're, they're kind of basing it on is about three to six seconds per note and then you're using it 10 to 20 times a day.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: This would stress me out. You want to know why? Because every time I take a note, I would be thinking it is just one step closer to the day that I have to throw this away.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: And I wonder if I would even take as many notes as you would think. So basically it just turns on when you take a note and then that's it.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And so like the, the over the battery life. So it's, they're saying that it's about 12 to 15 hours of total recording time over the, the life of the, the Ring's battery.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: I don't think I would. I think I would get way more than two years out of it. I don't think I would do 10 to 15 recordings a day. There's no way.
I feel you really have to commit. It's like I threw out my notebook. I don't have a watch and this is the pebble product.
Interesting.
I wonder if the pebble watch also has this ability if it does dictation into the same kind of transcription.
Interesting. See, to me the watch is more compelling because I need something that tells the time and so I don't want something that's does duplicates what I already have on the watch. But I appreciate a simple, a simplified version that has better battery life, doesn't spy on me as much, etc.
I think you should buy it and tell me if you like it.
What do you think?
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Like I'm, I'm.
The more I. As I get older, I'm trying to be more of a. I was actually even think contemplating getting rid of the watch altogether, even the Apple watch. But I wanted the. It's really more from a health standpoint that I decided to get the new one and it was just more like sleep tracking, you know, reminding me to stand up because I was spending too much time just sitting or what have you. Those. Those kind of aspects.
So.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Well, I have a tip that we can talk about for frictionless text note taking that we can talk about at the end because I just thought that it fits right into this.
All right, other things that were announced at ces, let's move along. So amd, my favorite computer hardware company, AMD by the way is called Advanced Micro Devices. They make computer CPUs and as well as graphics cards. So they're way far behind intel in terms of market share for say CPUs and, and probably not as far behind but also a minority player in graphics cards. But one of the things AMD has already always done well, they're super innovative company.
They tend to make hardware that is very powerful for the price.
So you. For graphics cards, you know, if, if you're a gamer on PC, you know, often paying, you know, two thirds or half the price of an Nvidia card and getting very good performance.
And what they've done though is that they've had these AI focused chips for the future of kind of AI specific PCs. So they have these Ryzen AI chips and they announced the 400 series at CES.
Now for computers to qualify as a copilot plus PC, for instance, which is kind of a, I think a brand from Microsoft that has limited use moving forward, I think they have to be 40 tops. Tops stands for trillions of operations per second to be able to handle AI usage.
And AMD is saying that their new chips are going to be 60 tops. So they've kind of boosted that. So there's a little bit more headroom because they have these like npus in it, which are very efficient for doing AI workloads but don't use the power that a graphics card would have. Right.
And so it's interesting to me that they announced kind of the next generation of AI. And the reason I bring it up is basically for what you said, that AI is more of a wrapper. Right. It's not like a ChatGPT Claude that is the product. But increasingly AI as an as a is AI capabilities is inserted into existing things that we're used to.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: So it's becoming more of a value add as it gets more specialized. And so it's just really interesting that they're doing this.
I know Framework, the company that makes the repairable laptops, they came out with a desktop.
You basically take the whole inside of the computer out and replace it if you want to update it and keep your case, power supply and everything like that. But they use the Ryzen AI chips, you know, really interesting stuff. Integrated graphics are very good. Just a really impressive. This is, this is a small bump, but an interesting technical leap. So we're going to see, I'd like to see more chips from AMD in laptops and desktops and stuff. I think they're, I think they're in many ways superior to intel from a reliability standpoint in terms of consumer tech. So we have folding phones.
But now, Chris, the holy grail is here.
Samsung has debuted the Galaxy Z Trifold.
So if you want a phone that's 2 inches thick until you unfold it, this is for you.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
So it goes basically from phone to a tablet.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know if it looks close to the size of an. I like an 11 inch iPad, maybe a little bit smaller.
Interesting. I want to know how many folds you can get before it breaks.
Everybody I know with a folding phone has broken it every single place eventually. Because you open it what, a hundred times a day.
And so when they're like, oh, you can do 10,000 folds. I'm like, well, that seems like a lot, but not really. If you check your phone a lot, right?
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Yeah, especially nobody can go without checking their phantom limbs. So they're going to be checking it all the time.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: The secret is not keeping it in the room with you. That's what I do. My phone is always on the charger upstairs.
Interesting. A trifold device. I mean, it does.
I see a future. I mean the future that we always thought of was like, you have something in your pocket. Oh, I need desktop mode unfold. Hold it. A keyboard appears out of nowhere and then you have a functioning full size computer. Right. So I guess we're getting closer and closer to that vision.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: I don't know that Samsung would be the platform that I want to make my main computing device for everything, but it is an interesting.
The thing I wonder about though is not only the fragility of these devices but also the price. Like the, there's a $2,000 US price tag for the, the higher end folding phone, the Z fold.
So what is the trifold cost? This is a $3,000 US phone. Like this is a lot of money. Right. And it's interesting to me that I feel like that this is an interesting. It's a really amazing demo of the display technology and how it works.
But you know, for 3,000 bucks I can get a really nice laptop.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
And maybe even less.
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Oh yeah. I can get something way better than this.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: You could probably get a phone and.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: A laptop for that price for considerably less, I think. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting again, I'm looking forward to the day when it rolls up into a little tube. That's what I want to see.
And you unroll it like a scroll and we've gone full circle.
That's what I want.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: I'm waiting for projection like, you know, Tony Stark, like Iron man style. But anyways, like, you know, yeah, but you know, like Samsung's basically trying to get us to stop thinking of it as a, you know, a phone being a slab. But it's like expandable real estate. And I think the biggest story here is if this goes this direction, it's a big behavior change. So think about like, you know, taking your device and then it opens up to a larger canvas. So now what you're doing, instead of having people just scroll, you're getting them to nudge them towards longer form tasks like reading and writing and designing.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: Yeah, and especially, you know, one of the things that Samsung has done a really good Job of and they were early to this and you know Apple kind of laughed at it was the pen based stuff. I mean they had terrific styluses for the Galaxy Notes.
It was a terrific note taking device. Productivity device. People I knew still use the stylus. They say it's the best phone with a stylus. They can take notes down. They don't use it like a scrolling device. They really do use it as more like a handheld notepad. And it'll now with AI features it'll transcribe your handwriting very much. Again very much like old technology like the Apple Newton. Right. Things that were way ahead of their time. But this is of course so much better.
And you're right, it does change your behavior because when I pick up a phone I pick up the iPad. I'm. It's a totally different use case for me than picking up a phone.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know just from an adoption and from an adoption standpoint like the fold Foldables it's not just a new gadget but it's going to require new habits.
New app UX defaults.
There has to be like you you know you bring up like the durability like it has to be durable enough that you can trust it as a daily driver that you can use. And so if it lands you know it's going to pressure competitors like Apple and Microsoft and Dell and all them like you know if what is going to be the per the default personal computer.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Y.
Yep.
Moving on to the last thing. Perhaps the most fun. The thing I was most blown away with from CES and and somebody who used to work in education technology.
I've always liked the ed education technology toys like the learning tools.
I still get a Google News feed on the edtech tools. I love the osmo. I don't know if you remember that. It was like a.
It was really simple. You used an iPad and it had like you put something over the iPad and it basically redirected the view of the iPad's front facing camera. So then you could put things under it and you could play games with physical objects in conjunction with that.
I think that was osmo.
But I just.
I've always loved LEGO for the imagination. I love building things. I have a daughter, we play with Megablocks and Duplo and but combining some of the technology with it and thinking things through is really cool.
LEGO came out and announced this LEGO smart bricks technology. There's this brand new LEGO smart brick tech and so it can recognize other bricks.
So you take the smart brick, you Plug it in and then they can activate effects and play music based on other bricks that are around it. So I guess it has to have some sort of knowledge, I don't know quite understand yet how it senses or how it knows what it's in. I mean, it doesn't have a camera on it, it's not looking. So it's some sort of location, very small find, location based thing. So I'm thinking that that was what was difficult to get, getting the location based very fine.
Yeah.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: And I think it's like from my understanding they were trying to build this ecosystem around a sensor so that, let's say the light and the sound smart brick, like it'll react to what you're building and how you play. So it's basically programmability that's baked right into the brick itself and not just like an app overlay.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it says the new smart bricks are part of what LEGO calls a smart play system.
Our regular 2x4 stud size bricks. Obviously they connect on the bottom, but I don't think they connect on the top. So they're flat. Right. Because they have lights and stuff, but have their own application specific integrated circuit or ASIC chips inside.
I'm quoting here from cnet. There is an array of sensors. So there's an accelerometer that measures tilt and movement. There's speakers and synthesizers on board to generate sounds on the fly, ambient LED lights, and they communicate with each other over Bluetooth. And there's magnetic coils in this brick that sense proximity to other special LEGO smart tag tiles and smart minifigures which have their own embedded tags. So some of them are the. So the brick is like the central thing. So you take the brick out, you put it. You have two smart bricks, you have 10 sets. You can take the smart brick and put it wherever and it'll light up and interact. Kind of based on passive tags or other smart items in the vicinity.
It says the bricks can be used in multiple LEGO sets and can recognize smart tags and smart minifigures at once.
And so it's pretty cool. So one of the examples I liked is that there's like these Star wars ones. So there's like a Star Wars TIE Fighter and then there's like a, I think a Luke Skywalker, like X wings. You put the brick in and it'll make sounds and light up. But then also if you tilt it when you're flying it, it'll change the sound based on the accelerometer.
Really interesting technology.
And I think you can, like, program the bricks.
I'm interested in this Star wars duel. So it has like, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader dueling in Return of the Jedi in the throne room of the. Of the Death Star. And they have the smart bricks behind each one of them, and there's like a little arm so you can like play swordplay. And they like the lightsabers move based on movement. It's a really interesting idea.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, basically what Lego, they're trying to do for toys what Nintendo did with the Switch.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:03] Speaker B: They're trying to keep the magic in the physical object, and they're using the digital to extend the experience and not replace it.
So this is very much just from a story or business standpoint. Like, it's a platform bet, not just on a single product, but the.
The smart brick is going to become a standard component that LEGO can iterate new play patterns. And then this way that app ecosystem will evolve. Without asking kids to learn code first.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Well, yeah, and I like the idea that you could, like, you know, program your own smart brick. I don't know if you program it yourself or how it works, because in some of the demos, like I'm looking at the LEGO throne room one, you know, okay, there's the throne room. They show how you put the smart bricks. So you put the smart brick behind the emperor, and that creates like the red ambient light because he's the dark side, and as you swivel his chair, it plays the music.
So that's pretty cool. But then in some of the screenshots, there's like this little pad. It's like a little orange or yellow pad that they put the brick on, and it's almost like you have to program it. So I'm wondering if there's like. Is that hooked up to, like, an app on a device and you program it?
[00:40:30] Speaker B: I think maybe that's where they're looking at doing it in the long run, but right now.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: Or maybe that charges it.
[00:40:38] Speaker B: Yeah, like, I mean, I. I feel like it's just the, you know.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: Oh, smart charger, I must say.
[00:40:43] Speaker B: Yeah, they're trying to just make this imagination interactive while keeping the barrier to entry low. Just by snapping the bricks together, it just responds.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: I mean, I'm gonna. It's not available in Canada yet. I would buy one of these just to test it for the podcast. Honestly, it's interesting. So, like, this is 150 bucks US so it'll be like $5,000 Canadian.
I'm just kidding. It'll be like 200 bucks Canadian. So it's just the smart play Throne Room duel.
And it comes with an A wing fighter as well.
You get two smart bricks, three smart minifigures. So I guess the minifigures interact with the brick. That's the location based. You get five smart tags and a charger that charges the smart stuff. So it's a wireless charger that charges the bricks so they don't have to have pogo pins and connect it, which just makes sense.
And that's $159 US for the whole thing. And you get all the smart bricks. And I think those bricks can be taken and programmed into. They'll work in any. That has a smart. Yeah, so it's kind of like having interchangeable batteries. The analogy that I thought of was that, you know, the tools that I use for fixing stuff in my home, I, I typically use Ryobi because they, their batteries are standard across everything.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: A Lawnmower is a 40 volt battery, so that's the exception.
But everything else is 18. 18. Yeah. 18 what? 18 volt, whatever it's called. And so that works across like seven or eight tools that I have. So I don't need to have batteries for every tool. Right.
So pretty cool. I don't know. I was really excited to see this. I think this is amazing.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: No, it is cool. And you know, and this is where they're, they're still evolving. I mean I, I kind of wonder too, like if this brick, if it can sense and respond, you know, does LEGO now is are they still a toy company or are they becoming like a play operating system? And so I feel like it's still.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: Going to be a toy company. I mean they're not going to, they're always going to make sets that are not smart enabled. I think that's my guess. Right.
But it's interesting that they, they have a really interesting explanation because I was thinking and I would be curious to know your, your thoughts from like a marketing standpoint. This is pretty complicated for a kid's toy. How do you explain to people how it works? Right.
So like there's like a three image thing on their LEGO smart play system and it says smart bricks reacts to your move. Smart tags keep the fun going and going. Smart minifigures bring the stories to life. So it's kind of like you have these three parts. How do you teach people how this works?
[00:43:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know if from reading, but like, you know, some of the videos, like that one video that we saw I thought it was kind of cool where the, you know, the kids are making a helicopter, but then they took the helicopter bricks and then combined it with the dinosaur. Dinosaur. And now all of a sudden the dinosaur has the, you know, the, the blades to go and fly and it's, it's working and you know. Yeah. So like that. I think they're probably gonna have to explain it using video because this. Otherwise it's kind of challenging to kind of especially, I mean, I guess it's the parents that are buying it anyway, so.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: Still though, pretty, pretty interesting.
Yeah. Or.
[00:44:05] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: $70 for Darth Vader's TIE Fighter.
Maybe I'll get that as a test and report back. It's not available in Canada as the launch country. I'm surprised. We usually on the first wave, but we're not.
So I will, I will report back. But I'm always in, I'm always in the market for two things, quality baked goods and Star Wars Legos. So this is good.
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk, any other stories that we wanted to cover before we wrap up today?
[00:44:39] Speaker B: I don't think so.
Yeah, I think that was kind of like the gist of it. You did mention earlier that you had.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Some.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: What is it? Some smart or some tool or. Tip.
[00:44:52] Speaker A: Well, it's related to the pebble ring. So one of the things that comes up a lot, you and I talk about apps. You know, you have your workflow for apps and our advice for using apps, what apps do you use has been very consistent. Pick something and just master it and use it until it doesn't work for you. And don't really worry about what the cool new app is.
You know, if you want an open. If you need a notes app that works cross platform and you need it to not be cloud based, use Obsidian. If you need instant collaboration, then use Notion. If you're in the Apple ecosystem and you're fine with that, then use the built in Apple Notes. Apple Notes is terrific. We use that. I've been using it for so long, it's hard to get out.
I guess that's the risk.
But ultimately everything is ephemeral. That's how I think about it. You know, your notes, you can delete them all. Your life's not going to end. You can restart as long as you don't delete your password manager. There's very few things that are absolutely can't be redeveloped in terms of documents and software and stuff. But one of the things that I do find useful as a, as a Tool that kind of crosses platform or uses across things is kind of what you mentioned, Chris, is something that's a frictionless place just to capture ideas.
So there's a tool that's been around for a while.
I don't know if it's on anything but the Apple platform.
I'll take a look.
I suspect not.
But there's other things like this and it's called Drafts.
And so Drafts is kind of like a note taking app. There's an inbox, there's flags, there's your archives or things that live in trash. But the idea isn't for it to be a permanent place for notes. The goal is that it's a place where you can capture things quickly and then share them out as necessary.
So the thing that Drafts has going for it is that you can take a note, you can dictate it, just brain dump it into your inbox.
And it's all done in markdown language, which I highly recommend people use for note taking because it's kind of universal. It works in Microsoft Word, it works in a variety of apps, it works on WordPress, works on the web. So like for instance, hashtag space, something that's H1 hashtag, hashtag would be H2, et cetera. It's very easy to learn.
But the thing that Drafts has going for it is that it has a lot of connectors. There's a free version which is very, very functional, and then there's a paid version which is very inexpensive and you can connect it to Google Drive, Google Docs, and it can be, you can amend text and send it to other apps, OneDrive, OneNote, send to reminders, send to everything. Right. And then there's also kind of a community around it where people have built custom connectors to very bespoke apps. So it's a great text capture tool that's friction free, works across all Apple's platform. I'm sorry, I don't have a Windows equivalent right now. I know we try to do that, but it's very extensible, meaning that you can send it, there's a script, it supports scripting languages, so it does all these really cool interactions with other platforms. And so if you're looking for something, if you don't want to go buy a two year throwaway ring for, you know, instant capture and you're looking for more of an app based solution, Drafts is great.
Cool. Yeah. But that's all I really have to say today, so maybe that's a good place to wrap things up.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Well, until next time.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: You bet. Take care, Sam.
