Touch is Nice-To-Have On The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR - DTNS 5389

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3:37this is the daily tech news for thursday november 5th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you the important context and help each other understand today camille boz boz from duck.go

3:48Sarah Lane: is going to tell us why he thinks schools can have search without ai if they want to And reviews of Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro are pouring in. They're rolling in and pouring in and coming, falling from the sky. Everybody's talking about them. I'm Jason Howell. And I'm Sarah Lane. We're going to talk about what you need to know with a big story.

4:11All right, so let's talk Apple because Apple has a few different products that we're going to talk about today that are kind of clearing the reviews embargo. And definitely at the very top of that list is Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro, the ProLED. ProLED? How do they say it? ProLED? ProLED?

4:28Sarah Lane: I think they say ProLED XDR, but I don't know why they called it that. I mean, it could go either way, right? This is going to be a GIF or GIF moment for me. I can already tell. But the laptop has arrived. Reviews hitting the web, like I said, in droves this morning. Everybody's talking about it. But reviewers mostly seem to agree that the new display makes a much stronger case for upgrading, but not necessarily for the signature feature that you might think. What would that feature be, Jason? See, that's like a tease. Maybe I don't need to tease, but there you go. The new OLED panel, resoundingly impressive, according to reviewers.

5:08Most of the reviews that I read, they were going off about how beautiful this display is. Bloomberg noticed significant improvements in brightness, noticeably more detailed contrast, vibrancy gains just overall over previous models. Beautiful display. They say the display quality is the key feature on the new laptops. Of course, then you've got the technology of the display, the touchscreen capabilities. And that's where opinions differed a little bit. Like it wasn't that I didn't really read any reviews where they were saying it's garbage or anything like that. I think the reviews seem to say it's not essential, but it's really nice to have.

5:43David Pierce at The Verge admitted that touch came in very handy when doing things like looking at photos or tapping a video deposit. Or if you have a few people gathered around a device instead of huddling over the touchpad, everybody could kind of get their fingers on the display. Gizmodo's Kyle Barr called the touchscreen useful on occasion, handy at times, but not purely essential. uh bloomberg's chris welch noticed that the um you know away from the display and now to the other features redesigned speakers um sound excellent boomy and nice full sounding for movies and tv but perhaps um chris said a little too boomy for things like music and podcasts almost too good for their own right for podcasts didn't love that bass yeah i know sometimes you know you you like to feel the voice as you're listening to it and some people don't um nine to five max uh chance miller very impressed by how light the even the 16 inch model is you know usually those larger devices wow they're they're like huge bricks um considering the large display size chance says this thing's actually really light and easy to to carry around uh as for performance of course you know given that they have the m5 pro m5 max from already available MacBook Pro models.

6:59These perform as you might expect by comparison with those. But overall, it seems like reviews are incredibly positive. And now, Sarah, I want to replace my 2021 MacBook Pro with one of these. Talk me out of it.

7:13Sarah Lane: Well, I don't think I should. So the whole is the touchscreen essential for a Mac? I think any of us who just use a computer, it doesn't even have to be Mac users, regularly say, No, I mean, you have a keyboard and a trackpad or a mouse and you go on about your business. But I do think it's a plus. When the MacBooks came out with the Touch Bar, I had one of those. That was circa 2016, I think? Yeah, somewhere around there. It was 2016. Yeah. In fact, I remember it was exactly 2016 because I left a certain job and I had to buy a computer because my company computer had been taken away. So that was November of 2016.

8:04Sarah Lane: I liked it. I thought it was cool. And a lot of other people were like, it's just so unnecessary. Why do you need it? It's like, yeah, I was kind of in that camp. It depends on what you're doing, though. It depends on what app you're using at that specific time. It's it's not necessary. I mean, it's gone away. I don't really miss it. But having a touch screen is it's I think it's the way of the future. I just do. And you don't ever have to touch the screen. That's the best part of that. It's a nice bonus. It's a nice bonus. Exactly. And like you said, people are raving about the display. We were talking before the show started about our bad eyes and the fact that we have to wear glasses or contacts.

8:51Sarah Lane: I don't know how much that really is a bonus to me at the stage of my life. I'll put on my readers, but then it's just going to throw me off for the show. Yeah, as long as I can read, I'm pretty much good to go. So that's great. But also, I used to think that not having an OLED display was not a big deal. But then when you get it, you go, oh, okay. All right. Now it's supposed to look like this. yeah so yeah it's hard to go back when you end up in that situation too it's kind of like high refresh i feel this about high refresh too seemed in the beginning like unnecessary but then once your eyes get used to that sort of thing and especially with longevity of use which i'm imagining these reviewers probably had these for at least a week i'm guessing in some cases you know longer time i think you get used to that and then once you don't have it anymore you really i mean can you adjust and can you be without it if you absolutely have to of course right like we can all adjust and and kind of recalibrate but once you have it it's really hard to want to go back we've all you you were talking about the 16 um inch screen macbook pro i used to have the 17 inch yes i did too yes did you did you yeah well yeah i have a brush actually actually my daughter has it now because it's the laptop that i didn't use anymore and she needed a laptop so now she you might as well use it like in like your home gym because it's heavy and heavy and huge heavy It's been huge.

10:19Sarah Lane: And at one point I was like, that's what I want. And now I've got a MacBook Air. It's extremely light, you know, pick it up with one hand, no problem. And so, so yeah, 16 inch seems really big to me. if you're doing a lot of travel that might not be exactly the right form factor for you but but otherwise if it's light and it looks great and you can touch it if you want to and you're okay with parting with the money that you're going to need to you know to get to that point I don't know Jason it might it might be time for you it might be time all you really had to do though all that you had to do to talk me out of it is just say Jason you can't afford to buy a laptop right now.

11:05That's all I need to know because that's the honest truth. But someday, someday, by golly, I'm going to get a touchscreen MacBook Pro. And not necessarily because I need the MacBook, the touchscreen or anything, but because it just sounds like the display, even without the touchscreen is probably really incredibly impressive to see.

11:22Sarah Lane: Every time I see, and this has always been a Windows machine in the past, obviously, because, you know, MacBooks didn't have touchscreens. But every time I see one in use, and it's usually like, doctor's office, veterinarian, et cetera, et cetera. I look at it and I'm like, that's pretty cool. And yeah, it's going to be smudgy. You're going to have to deal with that. That's a whole thing. We deal with that on our phones. But yeah, right. Phones, tablets, the screens in our cars these days. It's sort of the way it works. Yeah, yeah. Show me a technology that repels fingerprints. That's what Apple needs to do next.

12:02the zero fingerprint touch display on all of our devices. That is not what Apple also unleashed this week. This week, we also got a bunch of reviews from people who have been testing out the HomePod Mini 2. And reviewers seem to say that it delivers a nice sound, fuller, louder sound with stronger bass, even despite having the same basic speaker setup as the previous generation. So you might be asking yourself, well then, so what is that all about? You have to imagine that it's probably attributed to this S10 chip, some of the computational audio processing that's happening inside of the device.

12:41So maybe that's part of the reason why. But even though it has the same full range driver and dual passive radiators, apparently it sounds a little better. Who knows? Maybe it's placebo. But reviewers like The Verge's Jennifer Pattison-Tui also say that the new HomePod is quick to respond to smart home commands, to music playback. So it's really snappy. That's driven behind the scenes by, at least for now, by Siri Classic, which is the existing and kind of legacy assistant. Siri AI, which is a big part of the story of this device, Apple has promised that for this device. But it wasn't present for reviewers.

13:17It's not out yet. It will be its own upgrade somewhere down the line. And I think that a lot of the reviewers were a little disappointed about that fact, that they couldn't actually test that out right now. But it has a pulsing sound glow light to make up for it, sort of. So at least there's that. I don't know.

13:37Sarah Lane: Well, you're the musician in the crew, Jason. So I don't know if you're looking for a smart home situation like the HomePod could definitely apply to you. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, smart home commands, music playback, that's all. You can get that so easily. We already have that in a lot of our devices. Right. So, I mean, if there are people who say, no, no, no, I want to buy it from Apple. That's fine. Cool. You know, go forth. But yeah, not having Siri AI, especially because I'm looking at it right now, my Echo Studio, which has, you know, Amazon Assistant Plus. You know what I mean? I don't know.

14:26Sarah Lane: I mean, I play around with it and I'm sort of like, I mean, it's sort of more conversational, but I'm still just doing the same stuff. It's like, turn on the day, I'm setting an alarm, turn on the light, set an alarm, play music, you know, play, you know, play my, you know, NPR station, that sort of thing. So, yeah, I know that Apple has been working hard on this, but the whole sort of, oh, the new Siri thing has been this promised land for quite some time now. And I think people just continue to be a little like, where is it? Why don't we have it in these expensive machines we're buying? Yeah.

15:07And I know from the Google side, and then we can move on, that in the Google world, there are many devices that get announced with promises of future functionality.

15:17Sarah Lane: Yeah. It happens all the time from Google. And I know that consistently people don't like that. They don't want to buy a device with a promise for the future. Just give me the thing now. Because, I mean, there's entirely the possibility that that promise doesn't get delivered on. And then you've bought something on something that doesn't actually happen. So there's always risk with that. Well, and you know, the less technical folks get confused by these things. They're like, well, wait a second. What did I just buy? It's like, well, it's coming in a software update, you know, at some point. And then Christmas is ruined.

15:48Yeah.

15:49Sarah Lane: Well, you know who doesn't ruin anything for us? That is everybody who supports us and our show DTNS is made possible by all of you listening and watching right now. thanks to Drew S., Jim Hartz, Alan K.R., and Technical T. Oh, Technical T. Yay! With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans. And it can help you build a templated deck, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life.

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19:13All right, there's plenty more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs.

19:16Sarah Lane: Let's do it. Following Tuesday's U.S. midterm elections, perhaps you've heard of them, where data centers became one of the key issues for voters. OpenAI says its new National Community Compact will drop non-disclosure agreements from data center negotiations and go further to ensure that residents don't shoulder electricity costs tied to its upcoming build-outs. OpenAI also promises to disclose noise, water, and energy impacts, reduce electricity demand during peak periods, and return power to the grids. OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, did say that this isn't a response to the election results.

20:00Sarah Lane: He said, no, no, we were already doing on this, the plan was developed through months of discussions with residents and officials. Basically, they're saying, yeah, people need more information about this. And they didn't like the way it was working in the past. Meanwhile, Meta is acknowledging the difficult road ahead for new US data center buildouts with tougher post-midterm scrutiny practically assured. The company says it's considering a move of its construction plans abroad. And Meta president, Patrick McCormick told the Wall Street Journal that every major cloud provider is considering the same move.

20:41Sarah Lane: Abroad or in space? I was just going to say, because, like, okay, let's move it over there now. You know, they're people too. They're probably going to have some of the similar issues that people in the US are voting against here. So just moving it over there doesn't necessarily get rid of the problem moving it to space no in fact it yeah and space maybe also doesn't get rid of the problem because we don't know enough about space but i mean it's true aliens could fly out of nowhere and be like what the heck you doing here you know get out of here with your weird data center i mean knowing how much you know landfill fill activity that comes from the US where I am based and you are as well, ends up in another country.

21:30Sarah Lane: And it can be really bleak, really bleak results of that. Data center activity, I think that, I guess there's two different ways that I think of it. And I don't want to get too political about this, but there's a lot of FUD going on about how horrible data centers are for any community. It's going to take money away from people and steal energy, and it's going to be noisy. And all of that has proven to be true at times. But yeah, I think the more that companies say, all right, people are worried about this. We get it. Let's rethink this instead of just doing it behind the scenes and having non-disclosure agreements with third parties that then end up making people feel like they're getting ripped off in some way.

22:33Sarah Lane: It's a good thing. Yeah. Oh, for sure. 100%. I mean, this is a forced correction in the past two years of moving ahead, full speed ahead at whatever cost. You know what I mean? This changes things significantly. It's no surprise that these companies are now, whether OpenAI, you know, there's probably no coincidence that OpenAI is announcing this now. I mean, sure, they may have started this whole thing, but they had to respond to the moment to at least start to kind of, you know, put people's concerns at ease and legislators' concerns at ease and at least show that they are aware of the moment and planning to do something with it.

23:20So, you know, and Meta has, as does OpenAI, all of this capital spending budget tied up in this. So this is going to be a real interesting story that we're going to be feeling the reverberations of for the next couple of years, at least. I'm really curious to see how it all pans out. Yeah. them. Motorola has officially announced its return to the smartphone race with the Signature 27 smartphone. We have talked about this in a previous episode, but now we have more details. We have a premium price to go with it. $1 ,599. So$1 ,600 will get you one of these bad boys. You get that large 7 ,000 milliamp hour battery, the best Snapdragon chip around the 8 Elite extreme gen 6 um 200 megapixel periscope telephoto camera 3x optical zoom on that one Motorola is also offering seven years of updates which I feel is a pretty refreshing change coming from Motorola that doesn't always offer that long of updates and considering those paired with a phone that has this kind of power inside I think that's a very good move sadly though Motorola didn't get the memo that Android users really do want more Qi2 magnetic charging phones Signature 27 will not have that capability.

24:33But if you're thinking you want to go premium and you want to buy a Motorola phone that's premium, pre-orders start on November 19th. Sales begin November 26th. I saw one of these firsthand. I didn't get to get my hands on it, but I saw it in the room and up close when I was at the Qualcomm site. How close were you? Oh, I was like, there was a person right there and I was behind with a camera taking video, because that was as close as they let us get to it, which is kind of strange. It's like, it's just another phone. But these things are -

25:04Sarah Lane: Well, and also, don't you want people to use it? And so they talk nice things about it. Yeah. I probably would have had nice things to say about it. It was a nice looking phone. I don't know, a premium smartphone that goes toe to toe with Apple and Samsung devices from Motorola. Do you think people are going to be lining up for such a phone? I think it's a tough sell. I used to have my very first cell phone ever was a Motorola. And we're talking like 1998. And so and over the years, I've had other models. I have no doubt that it's a really nice phone. I am in line for an iPhone duo right now because I don't know, something happened when I was ordering mine and now I can't get it until January.

25:54Sarah Lane: so um i'm not in the market but i don't know what about you jason i i'm happy to see motorola kind of stepping back into the premium market they've they've spent a lot of time away from premium and been focusing on lower and mid-range devices in android yeah i like what they've been doing with their design i just think it's kind of a tough sell right now to spend 1600 on a motorola phone i mean the hardware looks nice and what they're what they're putting into the phone looks nice and there's a lot of really great stuff going on here. I think Motorola has to spend some time in this category to really prove to people, okay, Motorola is back.

26:33So I'm curious to see if that happens.

26:34Sarah Lane: Indeed. Well, if you want product reviews from people who put gadgets like Motorola and anything else services platforms to the test, then your new show is Live With It. If you're not joining us already, you should. In our latest episode, longtime DTNS supporter Howard Yermich is walking us through the good and the bad of the open source platform Home Assistant Green. Could it be your next smart home solution? He has some pretty good thoughts on this. We are on YouTube. Live With It is at youtube.com slash at livewithitshow. And big, big thanks to all of our patrons. You keep us trying out new things.

27:18Sarah Lane: Join us at patreon.com slash livewithit.

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28:30All right, it's time for some quick headlines to make you look smarter, even smarter than you already are.

28:35Sarah Lane: And you're very smart. You're very smart. Well, obviously. But this will make you smarter. Nothing CEO Carl Pei says the company's first AI native product ships in December. Details, pretty thin. But Pei is calling it a productivity tool with no new screen and says it couldn't have been an app. So I don't know. I would think it might be something that you put on your lapel. But he says it will carry the personality of a nothing product. What does that mean? See-through? Yeah, probably. It'll have weird little bloopity bloops on it. That is a real word, right? Google, Meta, and TikTok have now filed separate lawsuits to block California's new law banning personalized recommendations in autoplay for kids under 16.

29:22The companies are saying that it violates the First Amendment and Section 230.

29:28Sarah Lane: Nintendo's latest earnings report showed quarterly profit short of expectations as Switch 2 sales dropped 41 % from a year ago. That followed price hikes tied to higher memory costs. So it wasn't so much that people didn't want one. It was maybe just a little out of reach. Nintendo is still sticking with its forecast of selling 16.5 million Switch 2s for this fiscal year. 41 % drop. Yeah, it's a big one. Not good. As for Sony, it definitely had a better day, raising its full-year profit outlook 9%, thanks largely to Spider-Man Brand New Day, even as PS5 sales slowed to$2.6 million ahead of Grand Theft Auto 6, which finally hits consoles on November 19th.

30:14That's right around the corner. Unrelated to earnings, though, and very cool on its own, Sony launched the$60 MDR3R, their USB-C wired headphones modeled on the classic wired pair that came with the original 1979 Walkman. And I kind of want one. Wow, me too. Yeah.

30:35Sarah Lane: I mean, you know, I've got my MDRs, but they're definitely not circa 1979. No, the little plush-like thing that just rests on top of your ear. The first Walkman I had was definitely not until the 80s. So, yeah, I don't know. This just sounds cool in general. OpenAI's new ChatGPT Images 2.6 can turn a prompt or a photo into an animated GIF. Yes, Jason, I say GIF. And you can adjust the speed and edit individual frames, rolling out to everybody, including free users. I say both. It just depends on the day. I don't actually know what I say. Interesting. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, or is it German? No, it's probably Mark Gurman.

31:22reports Apple cut the daily AI spending cap for some engineers from$300 to$200 last month. More cuts are looming. The token maxing reckoning apparently has come to Apple as well.

31:36Sarah Lane: Speaking of Apple, the company now offers retention messaging. So that lets developers show you a message or a special offer if you try to cancel a subscription before the cancellation goes through. So each app can get as many as 10 of those really annoying messages saying, please, please, please stay. 10 of them. That sounds a little overboard to me if I'm understanding that right. I don't know if I want to get 10, no, please don't go emails or messages, whatever. YouTube is rolling out. I also don't like this. YouTube is rolling out an app redesign that drops the dedicated subscriptions tab.

32:14So the channels that you actually follow now live another swipe away. You kind of have to look for them in the home tab. They're not just right there, ready to be tapped. It's showing up on Android and iOS.

32:26Sarah Lane: Yep, not a fan, huh? Nah, nah, don't care for it. Well, somebody might be a fan of Instagram's edits video editor, now as a Mac app with multi-track timelines, keyframes, watermark-free 4K exports. Instagram says, take it to the desktop. Take it to the desktop. Take it to the limit. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. Google's received quite a bit of backlash about its policy that AI can't be removed from search for schools. Earlier this week, Tom suggested maybe schools could use DuckDuckGo instead. So Jason sat down with Camille Bazbaz, chief public affairs officer over at DuckDuckGo, to ask him just that seems like they had that idea as well all right so tom and i discussed uh just a couple of days ago on tuesday's show that google is now telling k through 12 schools in the u.s that ai in search is all or nothing basically if schools choose no generative ai via google well then search would not be an option for those students this would be starting next year this poses a big question does it have to be all or nothing and joining me to discuss this topic right now is camille boz boz who's chief public affairs officer at private browsing company duck duck go it's great to have you on dtns camille thanks for having me yeah absolutely i'm excited to talk about this it's so now and i know you've been really busy in the last couple of days because of this news it's certainly been uh you know i've seen a lot of people talking about it let's um start with the technicality of this because google has as we well know integrated search into ai so deeply over the past couple of years uh they seem to be saying here that the two are so tightly wound together that it's impossible to separate them how do we actually know whether ai is as i believe duck duck go feels a module that could be separated or that it's so intertwined that it's inescapable.

34:30That's right. I think the main question here is what is user facing? If Google is making an argument that there's AI working behind the scenes in search rankings or in deciding what users see, that's one thing. What I think educators, concerned parents, and administrators care about is the extent to which if you use Google or if a student used Google, will you see an AI overview that will give you the answer. And there is no technical reason why AI overviews cannot be turned off. I mean, just in my research the last few days about understanding what Google offers to students, ads are turned off in schools, right?

35:12And that makes sense. You don't want, you know, if you're researching a book report to see an ad for the book before you get to the answers about, you know, whatever you were, you, you were looking for. So you're trying to tell me that you can turn off ads, which is the most important thing to your business, but you can't turn off this overview module and, or sort of forcing that for, for kids. The way to think about it is just like maps or, you know, weather or any of those things. It's a choice to, to, to what actually shows up with those searches and turning that off, isn't technically impossible you should still be able to see everything else um below the page yeah and um in my conversation with tom yesterday he pointed out that google search does offer a mode called web right you know up there with like photos and shopping whatever in the three dot menu you go there and there is a web area and like i was playing around with this a few hours ago on another podcast ai inside and it shows web results it doesn't show any of the ai so by all accounts there is a way to do this.

36:19Why do you believe Google isn't considering that to be a solution? I think because they have the market power to say, no, thank you. Schools, you know, obviously part of what we're talking about is how DuckDuckGo could be in more schools. But when you have a monopoly like Google's, you don't really need to give these kinds of customizable choices. You know, a major way that all search engines and AI get better is through a feedback loop where users put their search in, interact with the search page, and that interaction is a judgment on was this a good search result page or not. So that data is always valuable to Google.

37:07So my guess here is that they don't want to lose that data funnel from schools and And to get more kids using it or, you know, teachers or administrators is still a valuable clickstream data for them. And so since they don't think anyone's going to leave, why do they actually need to change their policy? Yeah, that's a really good point. That's a really good point. Now, Google has said in response to kind of the pushback and the, hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? They basically said, well, hey, we're just doing what the schools asked for. You know, they wanted us to get rid of of AI and search.

37:44We can't. So, I mean, your option is to get rid of search. How does how do you and how does DuckDuckGo think about that kind of a defense for an action like that? It is straight out of the Google playbook of how they've dealt with their monopoly accusations. I mean, what I found really interesting about this is it is as if they are negotiating with a phone manufacturer for an Android contract. Right. I mean, this was a big part of the US first Google search case is forced bundling. if you are going to use Android and sign the Play Store agreement, which allows that to happen and you're an OEM, you're a phone maker like Samsung or whatever, do you also have to sign this other agreement that is forcing Google products to be the preloaded, out-of-the-box default?

38:40So Chrome is your default browser. Google is your default search engine. And Gmail is your default mail client and all that. And sort of that forced bundling that you really can't get one without the other was a main thing that the judge found to have violated our antitrust laws, both here and other regulators in Europe have found the same. And so it's really out of that same playbook is we're just going to bundle these products together. And if you want one, you have to take the others. interesting so when we were talking about this story on tuesday uh we were kind of throwing around possible alternatives and of course at some point we both named uh or i think tom brought it up first i was like oh yeah that's good duck duck go as one of the alternatives i'm assuming you agree um what could what could that look like if a school wanted to go that route and they were like okay well google with search and ai clearly you know there's no they're there anymore um and and say they wanted to go the duck duck go route is that something that is like is there an on-ramp on-ramp for that what does that even look like what could that look like for a school sure so you know i think every school has a different setup and all of it works a little differently but the main thing is changing the default search engine and what i assume is uh Chrome.

40:10And different schools will have different rules around sort of what's allowed and what websites are allowed. But the main thing would be switching that to DuckDuckGo. And there's, you know, just to zoom out a little bit, you know, about why DuckDuckGo is a great option, even for parents and their children, DuckDuckGo's approach to protecting people's privacy is the the best way to protect your privacy is not to collect any data about you at all. So, you know, we don't have user accounts. You know, we don't know if someone searched for, you know, let's say our search records say cat pictures were searched for 100 times.

40:52We don't know if 100 people searched that once or if one person searched it 100 times. There's no way for us to create a search history about an individual user from a technical level. And that's important because that's how Google creates user profiles and then use those profiles for ad targeting. So the reason why you search for something and then you see an ad for that, you know, for the next two weeks, even though you've maybe already purchased the thing or, you know, it's not really relevant to you anymore is because of that search history. It's sort of trailing you. It's sort of something the Internet won't let you forget because Google captured that information.

41:38So DuckDuckGo doesn't collect any of that information. And we think that AI should be optional. it should be the user's choice whether they want to use ai in search or not so we have a really easy setting that you can turn it off and on we have an equivalent version of a of ai overviews called duck assist which is very easy to turn off and on we also have our own ai chat called duck.ai which is totally private and anonymous and we just the reason we wanted to make a optional is because we don't think people are a monolith and that they all want it all at once. And people should make a decision of if they want to use that technology and feel like it's the right decision for them.

42:24If you layer on the context of, well, any kid can kind of easily cheat with AI, then turning it off feels like kind of an obvious decision. You know, at the very least, turn it off until you have some sort of better alternative or just let the educators decide what's best for their own students. Apart from schools, we've seen that our sort of optionality stance has been a big driver of our growth over the last six months. At Google I.O. in May, um google basically announced that the search box is now a gemini box right if you put into google search how are you right now it'll answer i'm good how are you it won't give you search results about how are you yeah i mean you you look at that that box the search box on a google search page right now and it really is just a gemini box i mean it looks exactly it has many of the same features that's that's really what it's all about now right and so they're saying i think that's why you can't decouple it, but you can very easily just not show the LLM answer.

43:35You know, that is a choice. I find this also interesting from, you know, the most innovative company in the world that is also trying to moonshot and cure diseases and whatever, whatever, that you just can't turn the thing off, you know? So, you know, there's a little talking out of both sides here. And I think So we as DuckDuckGo want to inject some common sense into the discussion and just say, well, actually, if you don't want it, that's OK. I think that Google, because of their monopoly, they can do things that annoy users and annoy educators and annoy parents and not be so worried about it.

44:18And get away with it. Yeah. What are you going to do? Which is sort of hallmark monopolist actions. actions we at duckduckgo have to be so focused on our user and what they want and the different types of users that making sure they can have an experience for them is really important um and you know privacy isn't just for people doing creepy stuff on the web you know privacy is about our individual freedoms and our civil liberties um it should be for everything not just for things that might seem sensitive. And so, you know, we think everyone has a right to get it and should be able to use the internet more privately easily.

45:00Yeah. Well, I'm really happy that we had the opportunity to get the DuckDuckGo side of the story that is still definitely bubbling. And who knows what this leads to for your business, possibly some sort of school program. I don't know. Maybe DuckDuckGo has something in the near future for that. We're going to try and work on something, You know, I don't think you're going to see a DuckDuckGo classroom. You know, I don't think our approach has been stardom young in the same way that Google has. But I think that there's some simple, free things that we can provide to help educators and parents make the switch and make it feel safe for everybody.

45:45Because, of course, that's really important, too. Yeah. And make them feel like they actually have an option, you know, a real option. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, Camille, I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to talk to us. I know you've been really busy the last couple of days with all the news. So Camille Bozboz from DuckDuckGo, it's great to meet you and great to talk to you today on DTNS. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. I love when we have a story and then we can talk to the people who are like kind of integrated into the story. It's just such a -

46:16Sarah Lane: And have thoughts. Yeah. You know? He's not like, I don't know what Google's doing. A lot of thoughts. A lot of thoughts going on there. DuckDuckGo would stand to gain a lot if they were in classrooms. So, yeah, absolutely. Indeed. Yeah. I liked the sort of ducking ha-ha of your question where he's like, I don't know. Maybe. Haven't thought about that. I'll let it hard yet. Hmm. Might bring it to the next board meeting. All right. We like to end every episode here on DTNS with shared perspectives. Today, Gaspar and John have thoughts on this past weekend's talk with Scott Johnson about the art craft software that he uses.

46:58Yes. Okay. So Gaspar writes, I want to thank you both for this special episode. It was the most palatable, sensible discussion about AI I think I've heard yet. While most every talk about AI is usually to the extreme of either hate or praise, y 'all walked the road very well. Thank you both. for all you do. That was from Gaspar. And John added, this is great. I've been bouncing back and forth with tools and seem to engage more in finding the right tool. I liked hearing that each author uses their own process. The analog path helps break the interruptions. I may go back to that, at least for a few short stories that I'm trying to assemble.

47:38So thank you. Thank you, John. John, thank you, Gasper. And thanks to everybody for listening to the special episodes that come out on the weekend because they are special.

47:46Sarah Lane: Absolutely. If you're thinking about anything we talked about today, maybe you have insight into a future story, share it with us. We read each and every email at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yes, we do. Big thanks again to Camille Bazbaz, John, and Gasper for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. you can keep us in business by becoming a patron that's patreon.com slash dtns we'll see you next time the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

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