Tesla Kills Off Its Cars for Robots - DTNS 5195

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 29th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know. We give you some context and try, gosh darn it, to help each other understand. Today, Apple hasn't even said they have a foldable yet, but everybody is imitating it anyway. Yeah, I'm working on mine. You're working on yours? Yeah, I'm working on mine. Yeah, I'm Tom Merritt. I'm into it now. Let's start. What do you need to know with that big story? Yes, as Wynne just said, Apple hasn't even officially announced anything about a foldable. but the reports are that they are working on some kind of wider foldable probably an iphone maybe an ipad seems to have competitors in tizzy everybody changing up their foldable lines samsung reportedly working on a wide version of the galaxy z fold called the galaxy z wide fold at least by rumors that one leaks say would have a 7.6 inch foldable oled display and possibly come this summer at a galaxy unpacked uh leaker's now saying that honor is going to launch a new small foldable or won't launch any new small foldables this year so it can focus on releasing its own wide foldable and then oppo's find n7 may also come in a wider form factor uh it's easy to look at this and go like no new ideas you're just ripping off apple before they even have a thing well first of all we don't even know if that's exactly what apple will come up with and maybe it's convergent evolution where it's like, oh yeah, wide foldable.

1:32Good. Everybody was coming up with the idea at the same time. I do want to say, because I, so I'm hearing 7.6 and I'm curious about the specific aspect ratio, but I do want to say as an original Pixel Fold user that that was a wide foldable. And I guess depends, again, depending on how we define a wide foldable, the Pixel, the OG Pixel Fold also had a 7.6 inch foldable display. Oh, Tom has one. Yes. I still have mine and I love it. I love it. Yeah. and i i can't help i i mean so may i say as an as an og pixel fold user that i'm feeling a little spicy or salty right now but i mean at the same time i think that's where it gets it's going because obviously for a very very long time samsung did not change the form factor for the z fold and it was this really i mean it was a good device but it was a thinner phone and and even opened up it was technically a portrait mode wide like it was a big screen but it was still portrait-y it wasn't quite like the front of the phone, but it was still pretty skinny.

2:30So I do feel like we are all seeing the benefit of having not a very claustrophobic front screen and thereby a wider inner screen. I do think it's very interesting. And I mean, let's be real. And I feel like this has been a theme both here and also on Android Faithful. We talked about this this week about the co-evolution the ping pong or pickleball game that is you know mobile mobile mobile manufacturing yeah and i mean i don't yeah no no new ideas is not wrong but i also think it makes sense to follow trends i mean obviously last year we saw everybody coming out with slim phones and now but i mean it it makes sense you know and i guess like spoilers for other stories apple is still you know what it is even as a brand you know has that presence and so to ignore them would be you know foolish i think as another manufacturer and obviously i think it's it's um high not high tide lifts all boats but obviously this is supposed to be how it works right you see another competitor you see the drain well you try like riffing on some things and seeing who comes on time it goes both ways as well so it makes sense um but yeah i i'll be i actually will be excited to see a galaxy z fold wide um as i as i love my z fold seven so yeah give me give me that give me that landscapey inner screen i missed that on the pixel fold well yeah i thought to your point pixel it changed it themselves so like they had the wide and then went to the the taller form factor uh i've i feel like a couple a couple of things are happening one is we are in the early days of this even being a form factor wasn't that long ago we were just debating whether anyone wanted a foldable or not and it seems like yes there there is at least a certain sector that likes them including us um so so it is now a legitimate niche apple entering it always is the stamp of like yep that's that's for real so i think it would be weird if these companies didn't move into that space and say oh well when you see the apple foldable we will have an alternative for you to look at if you a don't want to pay for apple don't want to live in the ios ecosystem whatever it is you will have an alternative for you so it would be shocking if they weren't preparing for that i guess what's interesting is that you see the leaks coming out ahead of apple even announcing it uh yeah all over the place like i feel like i know so much about the ifoldable or whatever they're going to call it the ifold whatever it is i mean we can start a like a betting pool on that but it it is fascinating just because everyone is so tuned in and has been so tuned in for is it years now i mean it feels like the the the leaks and the rumors have been coming out for at least 2020 we saw royale doing a foldable display prototype at cds so you know and i think it was a year after that samsung announced that it was coming out with its first one it isn't because i feel like the the predominant rumor for i think last year wait what year is it 2024 2026 okay for 2024 was that it would be i i remember hearing more like oh it's going to be like a foldable ipad because that's what was it but it kind of makes sense right if like if you think okay well don't take don't do this to your ipad minis but if you fold it um that would be kind of approximately so it's just yeah so interesting that they have said absolutely nothing uh and we seem to everybody seems to know something uh including us and well i guess regular non-tech uh watching people too so i'm i'm excited i i am curious to see what the eventual iphone looks like and i'm really excited to see this new generation yeah i i like that there's competition right yeah i like that we're we're seeing different takes on it i i don't have the take of like how stupid of them it's like no everybody thought that that the note the samsung note was ridiculous and now it's kind of the default size of phones right or at least one category of them so yeah i think it's better to try things and put out your own versions than it would be to just fold in the face of competition oh i see what you did there well on on that bombshell of a pun uh we want to take some time because dt ness is made possible by you the listeners so we want to thank you listeners for making this yes and tom's amazing pun possible possible we want to thank don't blame them for that we're not blaming you we're thanking you so thank you philip less howard yermich and john atwood yay

7:15All right, there's more stuff to talk about. Let's get to the briefs. All right, we got a few more phone stories for you today. CounterPoint Research estimates that the best-selling smartphone in the world in 2025 was the iPhone 16, followed by the iPhone 16 Pro Max, the iPhone 16 Pro, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and the Galaxy A 16 5G. the galaxy s25 ultra is ninth behind the iphone 15 apple had seven of the top 10 and samsung had the other three combined they make up 19 of annual smartphone sales nothing there's a diversity of phones out there is what that tells me it's just at the top everybody buys apple and samsung yeah but the fact that it's only 19 of total sales means that the other 81 is am i doing the math 81 % is wild, is a diverse and varied ecosystem.

8:09Well, on the flip side of phones that will not exist, Nothing's CEO, Carl Pei, said that the company will not release a new flagship phone in 2026, saying, quote, we're not just going to churn out a new flagship every year for the sake of it. There will be a new, less expensive, the Nothing Phone 4A. Nothing also plans to bring out more over-ear headphones and open its second store in Bengaluru, India, its first U.S. store in New York, while looking for a location for a store in Tokyo. I guess, I mean, for this, this makes sense. And that it's so funny to me. And I always I was actually very recently, given that we've been hearing reports of like the OnePlus thing and everything else.

8:52and some manufacturers drawing back at least on certain models. I always wonder the economics of what is it like to release a flagship phone every year for these manufacturers? Like, you know, a phone is not, well, for most of us, not a yearly purchase. So what are the economics of releasing out a flagship phone in terms of like R &D costs and manufacturing and then like all that like presumably unsold stock? I just really wonder. So I don't hate this at all. And I appreciate Carl Pei saying that. I don't know. it just it's just very interesting although he says it in a very carly nothing will release nothing this year very oh there we go all right i i think this shows the dividing line of like when ram particularly is cheap it's kind of easy to up the specs and that's usually the complaint is like yeah it's a new flagship phone but how different is it really like okay it's got more ram and it's got a faster cpu and a better camera uh and we're seeing the line of nothing saying you know what the increase in the cost of making a new flagship phone does not make it worth it so we're not gonna we're just gonna keep the supply chain as it is it's gonna be a rough year for phone makers yeah well on the other hand Motorola the official smartphone of the FIFA World Cup announced four new mid-range G-series uh G-series phones with 120 hertz displays and 50 megapixel cameras of course Motorola is one of those companies that I mean I mean, nothing is pretty selective and very specific about their phones.

10:19So one or two a year, very specific designs. There's always a lot of buzz around one phone, whereas companies like Motorola and Samsung and the rest just have a glut of phones. That's not an insult. It's just there's a lot. So I always wonder also, so is it that similar to, was it Asus that had stockpiled stock? Is that the right way to say that? But I'm just kind of, again, very interested on how manufacturers are dealing on the inside with the RAM shortage. Yeah, Motorola choosing to flood the zone, I guess, with their mid-range there. We got some earnings to talk about. Meta and Microsoft both reported better than expected revenue, but Meta expects that growth to accelerate 30 % year over year in the next quarter, while Microsoft expects it to slow down.

11:03So, of course, the reaction was yay for Meta and boo for Microsoft. Meta says its generative models are helping it boost engagement and ad performance. 98 % of Meta's revenue comes from ad sales. So that is a big deal for them. And Zuckerberg was saying a lot of things about how the engagement algorithms we have now are primitive compared to what's coming. So he's very bullish on being able to improve that product. And looking ahead, Meta promises that the money it's spending and will continue to spend on its superintelligence labs will result in new models and new products, including new agentic shopping tools.

11:39so planning to increase the amount of money it makes off of e-commerce meanwhile microsoft gets most of its revenue from the cloud and its azure cloud business increased revenue by 38 percent but that's down from 40 percent in the previous quarter so it's decelerating even though it's rising microsoft cfo amy hood put that down to capacity saying that if it had more gpus or if didn't use any of its gpus for internal things it would have had revenue growth above 40 percent microsoft devotes a lot of its cloud capacity to internal teams for developing products like copilot uh so they're they're saying they they just can't make enough hardware for us to to grow as fast as we would like to in the cloud that's so funny i keep thinking of the mythical man month which just as is this idea that you can increase output of i think specifically soft or increase the output of anything by putting more people on it and the whole point of the book is that that's not really true in most cases i and i that is so interesting because i feel like normally we this general idea of you of like necessarily like like multiplying i guess the raw input to something doesn't necessarily have like a linear or other increase in output but i don't know i i wonder if that is true in just in just in this current state of data centers and ai and everything else i really wonder if that's the case and i want to make up a pun even though because tom has had so many today and i haven't had none of like the mythical i don't know the money the money the moneyful man money month or something i don't know yeah anyway i do think it's slightly different here because we're not talking about productivity what what amy hood is saying is we could sign up more customers if we had more capacity to sign them up um which i i don't know if that's exactly what she's saying or if it's exactly true but i i could see that being more likely to be true than just like oh yeah if we throw more stuff at it yeah all right well during tesla's earning call on wednesday ceo elon musk said the company will make the final versions of its model s sedan and model x suv next quarter tesla will offer support for the models quote for as long as people have the vehicles The Model 3 sedan, Model Y SUV, and the Cybertruck will continue.

13:58After production ends, the company will convert its Fremont, California factory to make Optimus robots. Tesla now describes itself as a physical AI company and plans to spend more than$20 billion on factory capacity and AI infrastructure this year. Yeah, retiring the S and the X doesn't shock me. I know that you know the S has been around since 2012 I think so 14 years and granted you can keep a car brand alive as long as you're going but they have the model 3 and the model y those are the replacement models so to me it's like oh yeah you're gonna you're gonna wind those down that makes sense but to replace one of your factories that makes cars with a factory that makes robots uh is a little more surprising to me and and it really is Tesla trying to say uh we are going to pivot towards being a company that makes stuff that puts smarts in it so whether it's self-driving cars or autonomous robots uh that that is our way forward which is the kind of thing that either uh is a ridiculous move that kills your company or turns out to be genius because evs become a commodity and you can't make as much money on them but you're you're skating where the puck is going to be yeah it makes i mean so for sure the s and the x makes sense also because they are a bit more expensive if i understand it right and maybe like the economics are them the the economics that shake out and kind of make sense because if there's a cheaper version of those things and they work and they're newer and have more bells and whistles that makes sense yeah the rest of it's going to be super like it's a pivot that's like a pivot so i mean i do think though that they need to take what you just said there we put smarts and things and make that their new that should be the new yeah uh yeah and i'm i am not yet convinced on the optimist robot uh the demonstrations uh haven't been the kind of demonstration where i'm like oh i want one of those yet um but you know maybe they they obviously aren't showing us everything so who knows uh and then this last story uh is something i think uh i like to do on dtns which is like hey you're gonna see this story like i did and freak out but when you read it it's not as bad as it sounds.

16:10Waymo reported to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that on January 23rd, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, causing minor injuries. So that's the first thing. Like, it sounds horrible when you say struck a child, and it's not great, but this was a minor accident. The age and identity of the child were not made public, and the agency has opened an investigation into the incident. That's kind of standard procedure in this sort of thing. According to Waymo, the child, quote, suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV moving directly into the vehicle's path.

16:45The vehicle immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. Following contact, the pedestrian stood up, immediately walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. I assume the car initiated some alert and then someone at Google was able to call 911 or I'm sorry at Waymo. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene. Waymo said the car was going 17 miles an hour, which is below the 25 mile an hour speed limit in a school zone, braked hard and was going six miles an hour when it hit the child.

17:21Waymo claims its peer-reviewed model indicates that most human drivers would have broken later and hit the child at 14 miles per hour. And just to set the perspective, I looked this up. The latest data we have from the NHTSA is from 2023. But in 2023, 161 ,478 children were injured in traffic crashes in the U.S. by human drivers. So this is the one we have from an autonomous vehicle. And granted, 2026 is young, but when it happens with an autonomous vehicle, it makes the headlines. when it happens with the human vehicle it really doesn't and except maybe locally um yeah i mean i don't know what the the the so okay as i i admittedly don't understand the laws around when something like this happens like i guess how what what what is it that way money needs to do in an incident like this for sure and so i guess i appreciate that i understand all this because yeah i had the same reaction i started i freaked out immediately and then read it and then of course, that stat that you raised is actually a very good comparison.

18:25And yeah, as someone who is extremely skeptical about AI applications, I do feel like, okay, this seems like very reasonable and very unfortunate, of course, but that we already have a lot of safety features that aren't necessarily AI-specific in our cars. And I don't know, it's going to move that way. And so I guess in this case, it's nice to hear that perhaps it made the situation better, like it improved the outcome for the abortion. Yeah, it may have. It's arguable that it may have. Yeah. And kids running out from behind a car. I mean, we don't want that to ever happen, but it's going to happen sometimes.

19:07And so this kind of thing is going to happen. And this is a test. And I think the investigation is good to find out, was there anything we could have done better? Was there anything that could have made this even less of an accident or not an accident at all or you know which would be the optimal situation well folks uh if you like honest reviews from people who actually bought and lived with products we've got a show for you called live with it sarah lane hosts a weekly look at the tech she and others are spending months living with because they need it so we had a recent episode with patrick norton talking about the headphones he uses roger chang talking about his wise cameras the smart home cameras he uses.

19:43Eileen Rivera talked about how she accidentally bought the iPhone Pro Max and then decided to keep it to see if it was actually too big for her hands. So listen to live with it to find out that and more. This week's episode on the Vocaster, if you're a podcaster and into the mic adapters, check it out wherever fine podcasts are traded or sold or watch at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

20:13And now some quick headlines that are just good to know might make it look smart to know these things. Google added new Android authentication safeguards for Android 16 and later and enhanced recovery tools for Android 10 and later, all meant to deter theft. Yeah, one of them that got us both talking was that if you input the same password multiple times it won't contribute to locking the phone that way if it's, you know, some kid or something. my mind is blown why don't we have this everywhere as someone who does this on a regular basis so thank you google dji announced a new rs5 camera gimbal weighs around three pounds it could work with a payload of around seven pounds part of the ronin line uh packages start at 680 now dji cannot import new drone models into the u.s but it can sell its gimbals as far as we know uh however the new RS5 does not have a U.S.

21:04release date. On Wednesday, Samsung announced new digital signage, the 13-inch Samsung Color ePaper, which is 10 % made from a bioresin derived from phytoplankton. That's just cool. I love this. I want to see one in person. Volvo's chief engineering and technology officer Anders Bell told The Drive that the company will absolutely continue to offer CarPlay and Android Auto in its vehicles. I just know there's people who are like all these car companies they're going to stop offering carplay and android auto and they're not all doing that some of them are trying it volvo is one that's like no we we know people want this so we're going to keep giving it to you thank you deep mind announced a model called alpha genome that can predict the effect of gene mutations to help identify the causes of genetic diseases and help develop treatments another example of a good use uh geforce now's cloud gaming app now available for ubuntu 24.04 and later uh windows central also got it running on bazite uh the the more game focused linux distro uh but it's not meant for that so it timed out a lot but you know we're making progress all right speaking of universal blue the developer of bazite announced it is helping form the open gaming collective with other groups to quote centralized efforts efforts around critical components like kernel patches input tooling and essential gaming packages such as gamescope now listen i know i i said this in 2002 and 2004 and 2006 and 2012 and 2015 and 2012 and 2017.

22:39this could be some momentum for gaming on linux i'm just saying this feels google maps users can now access gemini hands-free uh while walking and cycling uh so you don't have to try to pull your phone out of your pocket update is available worldwide on ios and rolling out to android no code platform airtable announced its first standalone product in 13 years called super agent which can coordinate multiple models to help you with whatever it is you need an agent to help you with yeah make a big deal airtable doesn't do products it helps you make your own products so that that's interesting to look at deezer making its ai detection tool uh for music available to other streaming music platforms deezer says its model is 99.8 accurate that's no nines that's just an eight sources told forbes that open ai is building a social network and to keep it free from bots it is considering using biometrics like face id or orb listen if you can and it's a big if make a social network that it gets guaranteed not to have any bots on it be curious to see what effect that has just saying fair enough fair enough well we end every episode of vtns with some shared perspectives today michelle and aaron have a thought on the story about ai productivity estimates yeah i'm not sure if it was michelle or aaron that wrote this uh but whoever it was they wrote my takeaway from the story about executives saying that ai saves them time while their employees the workers aren't seeing time savings is that maybe ai will be better at replacing the executives than it will be at replacing the workers all hail the ai overlords Can I tell you that while I was prepping for the show, I had to read this to my husband because can we just say, Michelle and Aaron, that we agree with you wholeheartedly and with much laughter and frivolity at the point that you made today, which brought me like a lot of just thank you.

24:38Yeah. I feel like the feeling of a nation and perhaps a world is reflected in what Michelle and Aaron have written. All right. Well, what are you thinking about? do you have some insights things that will bring us for all the enjoy please please please share it with us feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com yes big thanks to michelle and aaron for contributing to today's show thank you for being along for daily tech news show you keep us in business folks so subscribe get the ad free version at dtns.substack.com or become a patron get the ad free version, patreon.com slash DTNS. The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand.

25:22Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.