Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/15 – Are We Really Getting the MacBook of My Dreams?

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to 21 today. Yeah, maybe you should do the, maybe you should do it for me today. All right, let's get it right this time.

Starting point is 00:00:51 Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Friday, January 15th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is Apple finally throwing in the towel and giving us the sort of laptops we actually want. With those IPO first day pops, forget banks screwing startups, are VCs also undervaluing companies right now in a way that is unfair? Amazon wants to do in cars what it's done successfully in homes, and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Starting point is 00:01:26 I actually kind of want to title this segment, What if we actually got good laptops from Apple? These days since quarantine and working from home, I've been producing this show on an early 2019-27-inch retina 5K iMac but before then, all of my podcasting has been produced on a 13-inch retina early 2015 MacBook Pro. The last MacBook produced with USBA ports, which frankly, as a podcaster and mobile audio producer, I still kind of need. But also, the last MacBook with HDMI ports, with an SD card port, with MagSafe charging.

Starting point is 00:02:07 when I saw that this was likely the last of the line for this sort of thing, I bought this bad boy, maxed it out with the best storage and processor options I could get in hopes that it would future-proof me for at least five years. And here we are. Six years on, mission accomplished, right? I missed out on that whole keyboard fiasco. I've never had to bother with a stupid touchbar. I've not had to live the hashtag dongle life. and I've not had to make the Sophie's choice of either plugging my laptop into power or connecting a peripheral. Can you hear the smugness in my voice? For five years, Apple crucified MacBook and MacBook Pro enthusiasts on a cross of design changes nobody wanted, on a thin and light aesthetic that, frankly, has gone too far.

Starting point is 00:02:54 And so, yeah, I've been smugly watching the car crash from afar, but yet, I have also been worried that six years is a long time for a laptop. How much further could I take this beautiful boy and still get enough out of it? I've gone so far as to fantasize about and even speck out, a Surface Book 3. And, of course, I have been looking jealously at those M1 chips, desperately hoping to maybe come back to the MacBook fold to take advantage of that. Well, guess what? It looks like Apple has hopefully, fingers crossed, decided to throw in the towel and maybe just make laptops useful again.

Starting point is 00:03:33 Both Ming Chi Kuo and Mark German are out with pieces this morning suggesting Apple is, along with adding M1 chips, this year bringing back MagSafe charging, adding more ports instead of taking them away, and maybe killing the stupid touchbar from their MacBook Pro lineup, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The new MacBook Pro will feature 14 inch and 16 inch sizes and feature arm Apple Silicon instead of Intel CPUs. However, Quo shares some much more surprising tidbits, namely that the touchbar will be gone in favor of physical function keys. The MagSafe charging connector returns along with more built-in I.O. ports that mean most users will not need to purchase additional dongles, according to Quo. The new chassis design is said to feature squared off sides in both the top and bottom halves of the machine. Joining the flat-edge design trend started with the 2018 iPad Pro and adopted in the 2020 iPhone 12 series. MacBook Pro series will, of course, feature Apple ARM CPUs, but Quote does not share specifics about how the chip will fare performance-wise in today's report. The touchbar is apparently

Starting point is 00:04:40 entirely removed with the new MacBook Pro simply offering a physical row of function keys. This is interesting in light of the fact that the low-end, 13-inch M-1 MacBook Pro was released last fall and did come with a touchbar, although all of the first M-1 Macs essentially featured identical hardware designs compared to the previous generation. Quote does not specify exactly what I.O. ports will be offered. The current high-end 13-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models feature four Thunderbolt 3 USBC ports, two on each side. For context, the pre-2016 models offered an SD card slot, HDMI, and USBA ports. USBC ports are technically superior and can carry data at a much higher bandwidth, but the fact the current MacBook Pro features USBC exclusively

Starting point is 00:05:26 typically means users have to buy and carry an array of dongles. Things like like the SD card slot are much more elegant being built in, end quote. Believe me, yes. Mark German says this, quote, the return of MagSafe with the next MacBook Pros will also allow those laptops to charge at a faster rate, the person said. The connector will be similar to the elongated pill-shaped design of the older MagSafe port, end quote. But also real quick, back to Quo, who also says Apple is aggressively testing something called VaporChance, thermal systems to cool new iPhones, quoting Apple Insider. Generally speaking, vapor chamber or VC technology involves evaporation of a liquid, typically

Starting point is 00:06:11 water, within a specialized heat pipe or heat retention structure that snakes its way through a device chassis. Heat from processors and other high-load electronic components causes the liquid to evaporate into a vapor that spreads thermal energy through the evaporation chamber as it travels to areas of lower pressure. Finns or other, condenser bodies remove heat from the vapor, which returns to a liquid state and is carried back to areas of high pressure through capillary action. Apple has reportedly been working on VC systems for some time, but early solutions have not lived up to the company's high standards, quote, the iPhone's critical reason not to adopt VC is because of its reliability test results that

Starting point is 00:06:52 cannot meet Apple's high requirements quo rights. Still, we are optimistic about the VC reliability improvement schedule and expect that at least high-end iPhone models would be equipped with VC in the near future, end quote. On the whole tech company IPO pop bubble front, we've got another one. Poshmark closed up more than 141% on its first day of trading yesterday, valuing the company at more than $3 billion, quoting CNBC. The stock began trading at $97.50 per share. On Wednesday, Poshmark priced its IPO at $42 a share, giving it an initial valuation of more than $3 billion.

Starting point is 00:07:39 The company previously said it expected to sell shares at between $35 and $39. It was valued at nearly $600 million in its last round, a Series D in November 2017, end quote. So, real quick, think of those last numbers that I mentioned. For years now, VCs have been talking about how the IPO process is broken because the banks are, underpricing the market in order to essentially give their best clients free money. This is a problem because it robs companies of the full amount of capital that they could be raising from public investors. But I'm also starting to hear people talk about how VCs are now the ones ripping off their own companies right now. If I remember correctly, for example, a firm just raised its last

Starting point is 00:08:28 funding round like six months ago and I believe the people that got in on that round, just five or six X'd their money, and that would be in just six months. Talk about undervaluing. And yeah, maybe it's a case of no one really knows how to accurately price startups at the moment, because the public markets are just too high on crack. But now you see why companies like Roblox have delayed their IPOs and are now trying to do things like direct listings, because among the other people that get ripped off by mispricing these valuations are the founders and employees at these companies themselves. If you sell equity to VCs at a $3 billion valuation and six months later, you go public at a $30 billion valuation, think of how much equity you gave away

Starting point is 00:09:15 that you didn't have to. Think of how much dilution you had to put up with that you could have held for yourself. Amazon is launching Amazon Custom Assistant, which will let carmakers build their own custom AI assistants with their own wake words, custom voices, and more quoting the verge. While Amazon has allowed companies to build skills for Alexa and allows pretty much any consumer electronic device maker to integrate Alexa into a compatible product, the e-commerce giant has not licensed the underlying AI tech for use in other assistant-like products. Amazon is calling the new offering Alexa custom assistant, and it's starting out with a focus on the auto market. Amazon is doing so to allow not just automobile manufacturers, but any company with

Starting point is 00:10:06 a need for a digital voice assistant more control over the software experience. This will allow companies to create their own wake words and custom voices and capabilities Amazon says will coexist with Alexa as it's designed to work today. For the auto market, this provides Amazon the added benefit of having its software built directly into cars. Amazon says companies will get access to custom wake words that use, quote, the same state of the state of the art process used for developing new Alexa Wake Words. Companies can create their own unique voices for the assistants with help from voice science experts from Amazon that will help manage the recording process and the machine learning-based algorithms to build out the voice library. So much

Starting point is 00:10:46 like how Amazon has strategically worked around its disadvantage on mobile phones, where Siri and Google Assistant reign supreme, to carve out a dominant position in the smart home, it's now trying to better position Alexa as a built-in solution in environments that may not record. a phone at all, thereby bypassing the need to compete directly with Apple and Google, end quote. One thing that I would have swore up and down would be ubiquitous by now is mobile internet options on laptops. I've never understood why this hasn't caught on, and I kind of thought that 5G would be yet another opportunity for this to be adopted. Well, Samsung is a company after my own heart because they're debuting the Galaxy Book Flex 2-5G. Its first 5G laptop featuring a

Starting point is 00:11:38 2-1 design, 11th-gen- Intel CPUs, and an S-Pen stylus, quoting digital trends. The laptop has a Thunderbolt 4 port, a USB-Typec port, and a USB 3.0 port, plus there's also Wi-Fi 6 on board, Wi-Fi Direct, and Bluetooth 5.1, rounding out the impressive array of connectivity options. There's a choice of either the 11th generation Intel Core I7 or Core I5 processor, both with Intel Iris G graphics, plus up to 512 gigabyte SSD storage, and 8 gigabytes of RAM. The Q-led screen measures 13.3 inches with a 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution, plus there's a 13-Mapixel world-facing camera to take photos with, and a 720P video call camera. The keyboard is backlit. There are two AKG-tuned speakers, a micro-SD card slot, a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, and a SIM card slot on the chassis

Starting point is 00:12:35 as well, end quote. Again, laptops need ports. Ports are useful. Ports are good. No matter how much Apple is offended by them on aesthetic grounds. By the way, this is available for pre-order today, released on February 12th, but sadly, only in the UK. No word on release in other parts of the world yet. And real quick, the Trump administration has added Zhaomi, along with eight other Chinese firms, to its blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies forcing U.S. investors to divest their holdings in said companies by November 11th, quoting the Financial Times. The move marks a significant blow for Zhaomi, which had been a big beneficiary of Washington's campaign of sanctions against Chinese competitor, Huawei. That had helped Ziami's sales to surpass U.S. group.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Apple's, making it the world's number three phone maker by units sold in the third quarter. The U.S. Defense Department said the move against Zhaomi and eight other newly listed Chinese companies aimed to counter that country's military civil fusion development strategy, but offered no evidence of the smartphone maker's involvement in this, end quote. So one thing we're going to have to watch very closely these next few months is to what degree the Biden administration either reverses some of these moves against Chinese tech or continues to press the issue to whatever degree, because the Biden administration may or may not care as much about Chinese tech as the Trump administration did, but they still at the same time

Starting point is 00:14:11 could, you know, just let some of these moves stand and let the previous administration take all the blame. They could, in other words, let tensions cool a bit by not stirring the pot further, but also keep some of these aggressive actions in place without their fingerprints on them. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And first up, as a devotee of the Blank Check with Griffin and David podcast, I have been turned on personally to the website Letterboxed. Letterboxed is a website for movie fans in a similar vein to how Goodreads is a website for book lovers, if Goodreads didn't absolutely suck ass. And apparently Letterboxed has been another COVID-Times success story, quoting the New York Times. After it was introduced at the web conference

Starting point is 00:15:06 Brooklyn beta in the fall of 2011, Letterboxed steadily developed a modest but passionate following of film fans eager to track their movie-watching habits, create lists of favorites, and write and publish reviews. In 2020, however, the site's growth was explosive. Letterboxed has seen its user base nearly double since the beginning of the pandemic. They now have more than 3 million member accounts, according to the company, up from 1.7 million at this time last year. And it's not just more users, it's more use. We've seen more activity per member, Buchanan said in a recent Zoom interview. Our metrics are up across the board. Their revenues have increased from advertising and optional paid memberships, which give users added features. And the company is no longer

Starting point is 00:15:51 just Buchanan and Vondratto's side project, as over the last year they have brought on several full-time staff, end quote. Next, I take no position on whether this next one is true or not, but I do trust Alex Danko quite a bit, and so I consider this provocative title worth reading for the provocation alone. Why the Canadian tech scene doesn't work, quote, there is a Canadian startup inferiority complex at work, and it compels us to defend our achievements. Look at everything we're doing. Look at these achievements and look at all these.

Starting point is 00:16:26 milestones our startups are achieving? Surely these milestones are adding up to success. We need a narrative that we're on our way, that we don't have these exits yet, but we're working on them, and that turns into a culture obsessed with milestones, end quote. I've kind of felt like Canada has been killing it on the startup front lately, so I'm interested to read that maybe you all remain conflicted about that, at least according to Alex. And Wikipedia is turning 20, So from 1-0, there's an oral history of Wikipedia's founding. If you didn't read about it in my book, how the Internet happened, and you're not familiar with the startup story of Wikipedia, then you might not know to what degree Wikipedia was

Starting point is 00:17:10 a major pivot story from a completely failed first startup concept. And from The New Yorker, another and a long line of pieces that I've shared about CRISPR and gene editing. This is another good summation of where the technology is at right at this moment in time, but also this morning, at breakfast, I learned that there are apparently 23 and Me style crisper kits that you can order to try this at home, which are we sure that's a good idea? Quote, I have almost no experience in genetics and have not done hands-on lab work since high school. Still, by following the instructions that came in the box from the Odin, in the course of a weekend, I was able to create a novel organism. First, I grew a colony of E. coli in one of the petri dishes.

Starting point is 00:17:57 Then I doused it with the various proteins and bits of designer DNA I'd stored in the freezer. The process swapped out one letter of the bacteria's genome, replacing an A, adenine, with a C. Cytocine. And thanks to this emendation, my new and improved E. coli could, in effect, thumb its nose at Streptomycin, a powerful antibiotic. Although it felt a little creepy engineering a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my kitchen, there was also a definite sense of achievement, so much so that I decided to move on to the second project in the kit, inserting a jellyfish gene into yeast in order to make it glow, end quote. And finally, industry inside baseball, if you're interested in it, Bloomberg has a big piece up about Spotify's

Starting point is 00:18:43 push into podcasting these past years and how this is the year that they're going to need it to start off. Quote, Spotify executives speak with some certainty about how podcasting will solve the company's profitability problem. If it happens, it'll take some time. Ack has sold investors on a future in which shows from Rogan and the Royals, reduce Spotify's reliance on record labels and lift it to profitability. His dealmaking has bought him some time to deliver on that promise. The company's stock price is more than doubled in 2020, boosting its valuation from about $27 billion to more than $60 billion, but ad sales stayed largely unchanged and estimates put losses at the company at more than $300 million, end quote. So as I mentioned, we're putting

Starting point is 00:19:38 together a separate bonus episode just to cover all of the products and stuff that was announced this week at CES. However, we're still putting the finishing touches on that. So in the meantime, the weekend bonus episode that will be coming at you tomorrow or tonight, if you're a premium subscriber, is a completely new type of bonus episode that we'll be doing on the regs going forward. I won't spoil what it actually is right now, but as I said a little while ago, we're going to be expanding what we cover this year, not just covering new things, but covering more of what we already cover, and we're going to use the bonus episodes to do that. This is the first of those efforts.

Starting point is 00:20:23 And at the end of the bonus episode, I will say talk to you on Monday, but actually that's not true because Monday is MLK Day here in the U.S. And I'm going to take it off. So more accurately, I will be talking to you again on Tuesday. See you then.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/15 – Are We Really Getting the MacBook of My Dreams?

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