Everyone Agrees That Sony’s New Earbuds Rock - DTNS 5205

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 12, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, Sony released new wireless earbuds. That's nice and all, so why did Tom make us make it the big story? I'll explain it all. I'm Tom Barrett. I'm Wintwet now. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Stand by it. Sony introduced its new top-end wireless earbuds, the WF-1000XM6. Now, you may rightly say that wireless earbuds are fairly commonplace. So why the heck would I want to make it the big story? And then you'll wave at all the Apple and Google and AI news out there.

0:48I'll be honest. It was the only story today that every outlet I consult, Google News, Tech Meme, actually not on our own subreddit. That was the one exception. But everywhere else, it was posted high up in its coverage. And the coverage is basically positive. don't you want a dose of positivity today if no no problem that's why god made x for the rest of you let me tell you why folks appear to rave about the sony wf-1000xm6 earbuds and it's certainly not because of that catchy name uh it's also not the price these are 250 pounds uk or 330 us that's 30 more than the previous model from 2023 but they look cool buds themselves are 11 slimmer They have a rounder design, and that allows them to put in a couple extra microphones, eight microphones to be exact.

1:42That includes some beam forming. That gives you better voice clarity on calls. Improved bone conduction sensors will detect when you're speaking better. Also has an upgraded noise cancellation chip that works even with your looser in-ear fits. Not quite as good as the Bose, according to ZDNet, but pretty good. And the Bluetooth antenna is one and a half times larger, So you get less Bluetooth interference, fewer dropouts. You can also adjust bass and treble in the mobile app if you want to do a little EQ. You can choose some presets that usually people kind of trash presets, but people really liked a couple of these, including scene-based noise cancellation that adjusts the noise cancellation based on where you are.

2:23If you're moving from a train station to a coffee shop, et cetera. You can talk to Gemini Hands Free on Android. And Tom's Hardware noted that these Sony earbuds have some of the best codex support that they've found out there. Battery life is decent. Eight hours. You get 24 hours total coming from the case. The case can be wirelessly recharged. And kind of the negatives are, well, besides the price, it doesn't include any health sensors or extras that you're starting to see show up in other earbuds. But the reviews are consistently positive for sound, codex support, comfort, and control. the Sony WF-1000 MX6.

3:00Let me say it again. WF-1000 MX6 earbuds available now in the UK, coming soon to the US in black, platinum or silver. Gwen, now that I've gone through the details, are you a believer in this being the big story today? I actually am. So I'm very biased in that I have too many earbuds. I love, I love, well, I've had Sony, the WH-1000XM3 series. So I do think this is really interesting because number one, the fact that something has like across the board positive reviews always gets my attention because there's, you know, it's human beings and it's gadgets. There's generally going to be some people that love something and somebody that hates something.

3:44So I do think it's noteworthy when something just gets like across the board positive reviews. I think that's of note. And I mean, it's Sony. I, again, as someone who's overly, overly so a headphone and earbud enthusiast sony obviously has been like super i mean the wh1000xm whatevers have been like a staple of the entire headphone ecosystem diaspora for a very long time and for a good reason they're really solid like i i mean i guess your your mileage might vary on whether you like this model or that model but they're really solid and earbuds like i think we've been talking this a lot like i know ron richard is my co-host on android faithful like he likes to bring up audio stuff just because it's how we interact so much with our phones which is kind of like our number one interface to the world into the world of tech and probably the world in some ways so it's it's it's almost like i'd say it is a commodity but for 330 dollars that's not quite right but it is like i mean they're they are kind of like just a very integral part of like the wider tech space and how we interact with things so i do believe it's worthy you have a big story and honestly, I'm kind of interested in them.

4:54And like I said, I already have too many earbuds. I know. I don't want to drop$330 on earbuds I don't need. I am very happy with my AirPods Pro. I even use them with my Pixel, which is a little wonky. I'm not going to lie. So, you know, maybe I could justify like, oh, well, I just need a set for my Pixel and a set for my iPhone separately. That's my justification. I also have a set for my nightstand when I'm just listen to podcasts falling asleep and i have ones i have some beats pros which i i say are for working out um but actually that's the kind of the thing right there's so many earbuds and because there's just so many from like you know like the more commodity brands you find on amazon to you know all of like the sony's and the beats and the air and the airpods that you know i do think some of these features do make distinction so the one the the earbuds that i bought most recently were the Beats Pro.

5:46And it was interesting that you mentioned that people don't necessarily like that there aren't any health sensors because the Beats Pro, at least the one that I have, I think it's the Beats Pro, have a heart rate sensor, which to be honest with you, I think is, I think it's interesting in theory, but in practice, I don't, as someone who uses Whoop for fitness tracking has flirted with Fitbit, Fitbit flirt, but not, I'm not committing very much. A Flirtbit. I don't, it's like, I don't need heart sensors or health sensors on everything. So I think that it's acute to have in terms of like technology, but I don't actually need health sensors or extras.

6:20And honestly, I don't really use hands-free insert your AI assistant of choice. Yeah, I do like noise cancellation because I do get on planes way more than I probably should. And then a lot of the other things like clarity on voice calls, like a lot of earbuds still sound like butt when you're on a call with someone. That's a technical term, sounds like butt. And I just these little things. I think that's one thing that Sony's have been in general, the whole class of like Sony audio products is that they are the workhorse and they are solid. And we keep talking about them because they do a good core set of features very, very, very well.

6:59And honestly, after all of the different earbuds I've had, I kind of just want something that works well, that has ergonomics. One thing actually about the Beats Pro that drives me crazy is that they have the whole outer like so they're over ear, which is why he's in for working out. because when I do player metrics, I've had like my AirPods and whatever just fly across the room. Not good. But the one thing is like they made the entire like back stem a button. So when I'm on a plane trying to lie down, it kind of just keeps turning off and on noise cancellation with me. So there's like little things like these ergonomics, which I think like in isolation, if you look at something on a review, it seems cool.

7:37But when you actually use it, actually live with it, they cause problems. So I feel like Sony has gotten their ergonomics down very tight. And now it's just all these little things. But I mean, like the Kodak thing, that's kind of awesome, you guys. These seem like they're meant for audio files. They're meant for audio appreciation. Yeah. But they're also somewhat mainstream. So I'm not trying to say like, oh, these are only for audio files, but they lean towards that. If what you want them for is fitness, probably not the best choice. I'm going to still try, though. So if I get these, I want to give it a try and see if they don't fly out my ears and then be sad.

8:16But yeah, I know. I mean, I know this is, again, like maybe me saying that Sony has a track record of them being great makes this inherently less of a big story. But I don't know. I do feel like earphones and earbuds are the whole thing. Audio files. I was just noticing like everybody seemed, you know, whatever acts they were grinding elsewhere in the ranking of stories, everybody's like, oh, but those Sony earbuds, that's nice. I wasn't even thinking about them, dude. And now am I going to get the Sonys? And I might just, just because, yes, you're going to. If you want to live with it, let me know.

8:51We'll just need a few more patrons to make that possible. There we go. Well, regardless of whether you're listening to us on your soon-to-be brand-new Sony WF-1000 MX6s or your Beats Pro, whatever it is, Maybe even over a speaker lurking in your living room. We wouldn't be here without you because DGNS is made possible by you, the listener. So we want to take time to thank Carmine Bailey, Chris Beneteau, and Jeffrey Zilks.

9:19All right, there's lots more to talk about today. Let's get to the briefs. Okay, so we have a couple of notes about Apple iOS updates. Apple released iOS 26.3, as well as the equivalent updates for iPad and Mac. The main new feature for phones in this release is transfer to Android, which makes it easier to send your photos, messages, notes and phone number from an old iPhone to a new Android phone. Apple will not send Bluetooth pairing or sensitive data from the health app. The Android device does need to support Google's data transfer API, which was just added in the QPR to update in early December.

9:54Remember, iOS 26.3 also includes notification forwarding that lets you send notifications to third-party accessories like Wear OS smartwatches. However, this may only work for EU users. Of course, if all of those Android-ish features are not your bag, then the next iOS update, 26.4, is what more people are excited about since reports indicated that Apple had said it would include some long promised updates to Siri, like asking to change settings or do multi-step tasks like edit a photo and send it to someone. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says its sources say those features have been moved into iOS 26.5 to give Apple time to make sure Siri properly processes queries in a timely fashion.

10:37And functions that use personal data, like finding old text messages to locating things shared with you by a friend, may be pushed off even further. Gurman says that it appears Apple is having a problem making the models perform at a top level while preserving privacy to its standards. Apple has said it processes queries on device or in private cloud compute and trains on license or synthetic info, not user data. And these aren't even the big improvements expected to come from integration of Gemini models on the back end, a.k.a. Project Campo, expected to be announced at WWDC in June. Yeah, this is going to continue to feed the narrative that Apple's not good at AI.

11:21There's no getting around that. It certainly, from reading what Gurman says, makes sense to me that they don't want to release it if it's not working up to their standards. That's good. And what's making it hard to work up to their standards is that they set themselves a more difficult task, which is don't just take shortcuts with private information. Protect it more, which makes it harder. That all makes sense to me. And I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist when I say that, but I'd rather them do both those things, if that's really the case, than release something faster. I am not an Apple apologist in the slightest, but of course I am an AI skeptic.

12:05But I will say that I agree with you, though, as someone who works in tech and knows the very, very attractive, the attractiveness of taking shortcuts when you're trying to keep your customers happy. And you need to compete in a space where everyone in a highly competitive space where all kinds of features are things are coming out. regardless of of of whether you know how much you know it would be better if we took time to do things right the pressure both internal and external to take shortcuts is huge and apple sticking to their guns which is something that they should always be allowed for is like again their privacy and and safety standards it's a good thing it's just unfortunately by comparison because other people are taking shortcuts it makes them look like they're having an issue or several issues, but it's kind of honestly solid.

12:56I mean, from my perspective as an engineer, that's kind of solid engineering there is like, don't lose it till it's ready. So I think it's worth pointing out that we're not saying that every model that works well is taking shortcuts. There's obviously a lot of work that is being done better than what Apple is doing internally with its AI. You know, OpenAI has been working on this for a long time and had a huge jump with GPT. Google has been working for this on a long time for a long time and finally pulled together all of those resources that had been, you know, developed. In fact, you know, the T and GPT was developed by Google.

13:32Yeah. And so Google, you know, was able to pull ahead. I'm not trying to say Apple is just as good as them. But at the same time, I think, you know, you look at what Meta is doing and some of the China models out there. And yeah, you can you can do a lot of things fast depending on what your priorities are. Yeah, it's that thing. I forgot how this starts out. But when you're building something, there's like three things. It could be fast. You can do it fast. You can do it great. And you can do it cheap. But you can only do two out of three of those things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair, Andrew Ferguson, has sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, as if Tim Cook didn't have enough on his plate, citing a report from Media Research Center that says Apple News excludes conservative news sources.

14:19Ferguson questions whether this complies with Apple's terms of service and the reasonable expectations of consumers. But Ferguson notes in the letter that the FTC does not have the authority to require Apple to change any of its curation. US FCC chair Brendan Carr expressed support for Ferguson's letter on social media. This is notable because it is what are usually very technocratic positions, although they are also political, leaning farther into the political and putting pressure on a company rather than just enforcing the rules. They're stepping outside of the, you know, we're an agency that is mandated to get you to follow guidelines and pushing something else.

15:04Interesting. Yeah. I mean, And I start a side question. And this is maybe just as someone who is not a journalist by background. Like, I feel like I've heard a lot about what is it, whether it's by law or just by convention that the two like both sides covering both sides or something. I forgot equal coverage or equal coverage. There used to be an FCC requirement called the Fairness Doctrine that was enforced based on giving you an FCC license. So the theory ran that the United States governed the airwaves and doled out the licenses, and therefore it could put some restrictions on what those licenses had to do.

15:44And one of the things was called the Fairness Doctrine. During the Reagan administration, the Fairness Doctrine was rolled back, and companies were allowed to present news in whatever way they wanted. Now, even under the Fairness Doctrine, you could still have partisan news. You just had to balance your coverage to the satisfaction of the FCC. There has been no fairness doctrine since the 1980s. So it is a desirable thing that there be balance, but it is not a legal requirement, which Ferguson notes in his letter. Okay, interesting. All right, well, Anthropic announced it has donated$20 million to political action groups that support regulations and safety measures, including Public First Action, which supports Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee's run for governor and Senator Pete Ricketts from Nebraska's re-election.

16:33Open AI and Andreessen Horowitz have donated money to a pro-business PAC called Leading the Future. Meanwhile, Anthropic also issued its plans to make sure its electricity needs do not cause utility rates to rise for customers. This fits with what Microsoft and others have said publicly, as well as with the U.S. administration's planned guidelines. Yeah, I'm on politics, politics, politics this week. Episode just came out yesterday. I'm talking to Justin Robert Young about how the different parties are going to use AI in their campaigns because it doesn't split down the normal party lines as neatly as other issues.

17:12So it is interesting to see Anthropic donating on the, not the anti-AI side, but the AI skeptical go slow side. And OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz donating on the pro side. And Anthropic, not normally someone you would associate with Senator Marsha Blackburn's election campaign. And Andreessen Horowitz, maybe not somebody you would associate these days with being opposed to Anthropic, but there you have it. it is a time for strange bedfellows. Instagram head Adam Masseri testified in LA Superior Court this week in a trial of allegations by a plaintiff called KGM and her mother, alleging that Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap misled the public about the safety of their apps while knowing mental health damages could be caused by them.

18:04So Instagram, of course, run by Meta. That's why series on the stand. And he said in court, I think it's important to differentiate between clinical addiction and problematic use. He compared being addicted to a Netflix show to using Instagram too much. He said, I do think it's possible to use Instagram more than you feel good about. Too much is relative. It's personal. Is he sorry? So is he was he saying that being addicted to a Netflix show is that, that both, that both of those examples are overstating it, or was he saying that you, that addiction to a Netflix show is genuine, whereas Instagram, you sing too much.

18:44No, he was saying like, no one is accusing Netflix of, uh, harming mental health when you say, Oh, I'm addicted to stranger things. Uh, and he says, Instagram is more similar to that them being addicted to tobacco or something like that. I'm sure I agree on that one. But I mean, but that's the thing, right? Because like, I mean, we don't know because I think so many people can use it so casually. And yet, you know, there are studies about Instagram's impact on, you know, young folks' health and other things like that. I don't know. I feel like this is straying into the same territory that environmental findings stray into, which is you can say there's no consensus and then people can say, oh, but let me point to the study that supports my end of it.

19:34Yeah, that's fair. And in this case, I would say I don't know that there has been enough studying done to say definitively, oh, no, the preponderance of the evidence is here. And that's not me saying there isn't any harm. But I think what Mosseri is trying to say is there's no evidence that this is the same kind of addiction. And he's not wrong to say that. It's not inaccurate. But there's also no evidence that it's harmless. Yeah, I guess this is one of the things that I feel like I guess that's my problem. And maybe like the wider problem is that it's like there seems to be something going on, but that it's hard to quantify.

20:11And we haven't yet figured out what it is. And I think that's why there's a difference between us discussing it here, you and I, and a judge saying, okay, but can you prove it? Okay. Fair enough. Folks, if you want an honest review of, say, I don't know, some Sony earbuds or something from people who actually buy and live with the tech, you need live with it. Sarah Lane hosts a weekly look at the tech she and others have spent months living with because they needed it. Rob Dunwood's on this week's episode talking about an older Sony camera that he's been living with for like six years now. I think maybe more.

20:49And why he continues to use it as his primary camera. What he loves about it. All of that is available on Live With It as well as lots of other great episodes on devices that people actually use in their daily life. You can listen to Live With It wherever fine podcasts are traded or sold or watch it at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

21:13Now we have some quick headlines that are just the kind of thing that are going to make you say, oh, I'm glad I heard about that. That makes this other story make more sense to me now. Russia's regulator removed WhatsApp from an online directory, which made WhatsApp difficult to access in the country without using a VPN, saying that the app was violating Russian laws and recommended users to switch to the state-owned Max app. Yes, we can tell what you say much better on Mac. NVIDIA's GeForce Now cloud gaming service is available on the most recent Amazon Fire TV sticks now without needing to sideload.

21:48You could sideload it before, but now it's just, you know, officially supported. That's great. During its earnings call, China's Lenovo joins the warnings that prices are rising because of, drumroll please, not surprising, memory shortages and does not expect the pressure to ease this year. I guess this is Dog Bites Man, but noting that Lenovo also agrees. Data point. We need data points. It's a thing, you guys. Waymo began deploying its more sub-like autonomous, or not sub-like, they're not quite that big, SUV-like autonomous taxis in San Francisco and Los Angeles. These are the Ojai models that were created by China's Geely.

22:27I would like to have, I would maybe go on a sub-like autonomous taxi. They are pretty big. I'm not going to lie. I mean, like you go around the bay in one of those, that could be fun. Now we're just a whole different industry. China's Zipu has raised prices 30 % on its GLNM coding service due to demand outstripping capacity. Yeah. If you're thinking like, is there really demand for this stuff? Turns out, yes, there is really demand for this stuff. uh bite dance's video generation model called c dance 2.0 has gained a lot of attention on chinese social media for its ability to produce movie-like storylines from just a few prompts samsung says it's the first memory maker to ship hbm4 memory to cut to customers which in regards to the customers it didn't say it was nvidia but it's probably nvidia yeah it's i'm almost certain it's definitely nvidia but you know there you go uh anyway samsung gets to go So first, if you heard Android 17 Beta 1 was supposed to launch on Wednesday, you weren't wrong.

23:32Google did say that, but it didn't launch it. And it says it's still coming soon, but it hasn't explained what happened. It's coming. We swear. We promise. It really is. All right. Well, buzzword alert. Samsung announced it has completed the trademark Penta for its implementation of QD OLED in TVs. So if you hear Samsung Penta, that's QD OLED. Yeah, that's always a good one. And I always have a hard time remembering those. Like, well, which one is this one? Penta is QD OLED. All right. I'll try to remember that. All right. Well, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Andrew shares his reaction to the post from Matt Schumer we talked about yesterday.

24:12Yeah. Matt Schumer's post was not doomerism, but saying these tools are getting so good. You need to take action now if you want to prepare for the future. and Andrew sent us his post on LinkedIn, which read, apparently this was a big deal online yesterday, linking to Schumer's post. And Andrew says, it immediately rubbed me the wrong way, but not because of the AI accelerationism, because of the gross misunderstanding of what a software engineer's job was before AI. Quote, the actual technical work of my job, end quote, was never hands-on keyboard. It was in figuring out and refiguring again and again, based on feedback, what the users actually need, what delivers value.

24:55Code was the mechanism before. AI to code is the mechanism now. The job didn't change. And this prompt, quote, I want to build this app. Here's what it should do. Here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it, end quote. Except in POC land, I've not ever been given that level of latitude. And it's never perfect, not because the AI is inept, but because the requirements were wrong. The users lied about what they wanted. A competitor beat us to market or times just changed. Kent Beck said, software design is an exercise in human relationships. And that's where all these and the AI just did it stories always break down for me, the human relationship part.

25:36Even if the time required for the actual writing of software has shrunk to be effectively zero, we still need to figure out what it is we need to build. And we need to show the output to other people too. We can't outsource that to AI because what to build is unknown in the beginning and we need to discover it to create it together. The actual clarion call of AI to software engineers is to get more connected. We build software for humans after all, most of us anyway. Talk to your users, talk to your peers, refine concepts, loop back quickly with ideas. AI is amazing, but human machine teaming still kicks its butt.

26:11Make sure you find the human relationship in the bytes. Andrew, that was incredibly well said. I cannot disagree with that. And I think that's one thing that is definitely missing. And I guess, for example, I've had multiple folks, especially maybe managers, like directors, I think correctly state that, you know, a lot of the press, especially on the engineering side, we keep seeing, you know, claims and studies that say this improves productivity, but it is only measuring productivity in the amount of code cranked out. And I've had managers who are indeed AI enthusiasts and actually AI accelerationists, if that's a word now, say that, you know, at the same time, especially senior, like mid to senior and above level engineers, coding is an incredibly small percentage of your job.

27:02And most of the job is like, for example, my job now as like a senior staff engineer is, as Andrew said, I have so many meetings, you all, where we just talk about how to do something. And yes, user flow, design, everything. You, there are so many smart people that I work with and we can't catch everything, even from just a high level product user experience perspective. There's always going to be something we didn't think about. Oh, there's always going to be some way that a user uses our thing that we had no idea and now we have to account for. And I agree this idea that, um, other than, you know, and I know like micro apps are a thing and vibe coding is totally saying, do it if you want.

27:37But if we're talking about software engineering as a business, as a discipline, yes, the real process has a lot more humans in it. And while yes, and I honestly am, as I said, an AI skeptic, and I have problems with it still in terms of like the coding side. Andrew's absolutely right. Even if you took coding completely out of the equation, there's still a ton of human elements. So I do think that unfortunately in the, in this kind of accelerationism, these ideas, like, like, I, I almost feel like everyone starts with the, with this kind of end, end idea, right? There's like, all coding will be done by AI.

28:19And rather than that becoming the organic endpoint of all of this accelerationism, we're starting that with that, with the assumption of where we're going and the marketing, the approach, everything is kind of just trying to zip to that point as fast as possible. And we miss out on how we actually get to a point where maybe I don't actually code at all. And we're missing out on the things that Andrew is talking about. So sorry, I just got in a soapbox, but I really appreciate what you said, Andrew, because that is like the real thing. Like as you get, especially as you get more and more senior, your job becomes less and less coding.

28:56I will say that, and then again, I've said this before on the show, is that my gripe is that if someone's coming in now as a coder right now, because of how fast it's going and because we're kind of seeing a particular endpoint and just trying to zip to it as fast as possible, I do feel like still entry-level, mid-level folks are getting lost in the shuffle. And I think if we can think more about things, if we focus on what Andrew is saying and that the job is not just coding, that engineering is also thinking and very much so thinking of people. There's this joke that engineers just like are introverted, you know, people that don't see the sun.

29:29I mean, that's still kind of true for me. But at the same time, people are ultimately my job, interacting with human beings, just a little bit removed. So I think we really do need to focus on that part because that, if anything, engineering will still be that, what Andrew is talking about. And we somehow need to be able to give engineers now that skills because I'm not going to do this job forever, y 'all. I'm going to retire at some point. So we need to kind of figure out that gap. So excellent, excellent point of view, Andrew, at least from my perspective. No, I agree. And I agree with both of you.

29:59What I love about what Andrew did here was he didn't trash AI. I think the temptation is to go one way or the other. He's like, no, there's some really useful tools in here. They're useful for particular things. And we are learning what those particular things are. But maybe someday they'll be good at this other stuff, like human relationships and plannings and getting users not to lie. But not yet. Right now, that stuff is still entirely in the human domain. So I hope I didn't overstep in pulling your LinkedIn post into the show. But I thought this was extremely, I'm all choked up, Joanne. Yeah, no, I am too, Tom.

30:36No, it was really, really good. Thank you, Andrew. And yeah, I know I'm an askeptic, but I think if we kind of took a look at the human element more, I mean, I am still trying it. It's just like, yeah, I think maybe Andrew has very aptly articulated some issues that I think a lot of us are having with this. So yay for the articulation, not for the problem. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, what are you thinking about, Diazm Insight? Well, why don't you just share with us directly feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Thanks to Andrew once again for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show.

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