Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/25 – Zuck Trying To Make Fetch Happen

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 the TechMeBrand home for Friday, April 25th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Alphabet earnings, Intel earnings. Apple is making moves to make sure all iPhones heading to the U.S. are no longer manufactured in China. Zuck seems bound and determined to revive his original baby,

Starting point is 00:00:51 sexy-looking new Motorola razor phones, and of course the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Ah, tech earnings are back. Alphabet reported Q1 revenue up 12% year-on-year, net income. come up 46%, services revenue up 10% to $77.3 billion, and other bets revenue down 9% to just 450 million. Google Cloud Q1 revenue was up 28% year-on-year to 12.26 billion, and they said AI Overviews now has 1.5 billion users per month, up from 1 billion back in October. Quoting CNBC, Alphabet made its largest acquisition ever in March when it agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion in cash, almost $10 billion more than it offered for the startup in 2024, and said it expects the deal to

Starting point is 00:01:43 close next year, subject to regulatory approvals. With the acquisition, Google will seek to bolster its cloud division's security offerings. We think this will help spur more multi-cloud computing something our customers want, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said about the acquisition on a call with analysts Thursday. The company said its other bets segment, which includes its self-driving car unit Waymo and Life Sciences Unit Verily, brought in $450 million, down 9% from 440,000. $495 million a year earlier. The unit lost $1.23 billion up from $1.02 billion the year prior, end quote. Alphabet says it surpassed 270 million paid subscribers driven largely by YouTube and Google One, and reported YouTube Q1 ad revenue was up 10.3% year-on-year to 8.93 billion, quoting variety.

Starting point is 00:02:33 YouTube, which turned 20 this year, released new stats as part of marking its launch in 2005, including touting more than 20 billion videos uploaded to date. For full year 2024, YouTube had an estimated 54.2 billion in revenue, making it the second largest media company after Disney. And in 2025, it's poised to take the number one spot, according to analyst firm Moffat Nathanson, end quote. Also on that YouTube turning 20 thing, they're apparently getting 20 million video uploads every single day. And one more interesting note, Alphabet's Q1. profit was boosted by $8 billion in unrealized gains from an investment in SpaceX. Alphabet has been a major SpaceX investor since at least 2015.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Intel reported Q1 revenue was flat year-on-year at $12.67 billion, but is forecasting Q2 revenue will come in below estimates. Also, they are reducing their 2025 CAPEX target. Intel's stock dropped more than 5% after hours. quoting Reuters. In a conference call with investors, new CEO, Lip Butan, also gave the first hints of sweeping plans to revitalize Intel's culture of innovation, including a mandate for employees to return to the office four days a week, fewer meetings, and stripping out unnecessary internal administrative work in favor of core engineering work. His remarks appeared to help Intel shares stem losses in extended trading, but they were still down 5%. The chipmaker's

Starting point is 00:04:09 Dower outlook could be another source of pessimism for investors who, are counting on tan to turn things around after years of missteps have left it struggling to gain a foothold in the booming AI market. Fears around tariffs pushed customers to stockpile Intel chips, which boosted sales in the first quarter, CFO David Zinsner said the company was not able to determine the amount of the benefit, and it expects the second quarter to suffer as a result. The very fluid trade policies in the U.S. and beyond, as well as regulatory risks have increased the chance of an economic slowdown with the probability of a recession growing, Zinsner said, during a conference call with analysts, this makes it more difficult to forecast how we will perform

Starting point is 00:04:46 for the quarter and for the year. Despite the mounting tariff concerns, Tan said on the conference call that he met recently with Intel rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, CEO CCWay, and former CEO Morris Chang. The purpose he said was to find areas of possible collaboration and to, quote, create a win-win situation. Amid Tan's attempts to streamline the company and cut costs, Intel also said it is reducing its adjusted operating expense target to approximately $17 billion in 2025 down from its previously stated goal of $17.5 billion and is now targeting $16 billion in 26. Tan said Intel is examining its factory footprint. In February, the company said it was pushing back a $28 billion factory project in Ohio until 2030. We will continue to take a closer

Starting point is 00:05:31 look at our existing factory footprint to ensure that we are making the most efficient use of our in store capacity before committing to any additional spending, Tan said on Thursday, end quote. Sources are telling the Financial Times that Apple plans to move assembly of all U.S. sold iPhones, around 60 million units a year, to India by the end of 2026, as President Trump's trade war, pushes a pivot from China. Quote, the target would mean doubling the iPhone output in India after almost two decades in which Apple spent heavily in China to create a world-beating production line. that powered its rise to a $3 trillion tech giant.

Starting point is 00:06:15 China, where Apple manufacturers, the majority of its iPhones via third parties such as Foxcon, has been subject to the U.S. President's most aggressive levies, though he has since signaled a willingness to negotiate with Beijing. Apple has in recent years been steadily building capacity in India with contract manufacturers, Tata Electronics, and Foxcon, though it still assembles most of its smartphones in China. iPhone assembly is the last step in the production process, bringing together hundreds of components for which Apple is still heavily reliant on Chinese suppliers.

Starting point is 00:06:41 India was hit with a so-called reciprocal tariff of 26 percent, though this is paused while New Delhi pushes for a bilateral trade agreement with the U.S. On a visit to India this week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said the two countries were making, quote, a very good progress. The U.S. accounted for about 28 percent of Apple's 232.1 million global iPhone shipments in 2024, according to the International Data Corporation. Apple would need to further increase capacity in India to fulfill all U.S. orders from the country, last year as the iPhone maker sought to increase output from India, Foxcon and Tata started importing pre-assembled component sets from China, end quote. Zip Davis is suing OpenAI, alleging it used Zip Davis's content to train AI models. Sources say Zip Davis is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in the suit,

Starting point is 00:07:37 quoting the Times. Zip Davis, the digital publisher behind tech sites like Mashable, PCMag, and Lifehacker sued Open AI on Thursday, joining a.mobile. wave of media companies accusing the artificial intelligence giant of stealing its content. Zip Davis is one of the largest publishers in the United States, with more than 45 sites globally that together attract an average of 292 million visitors per month and is among the biggest media companies pressing a claim against Open AI. In a 62-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, where Open AI is incorporated, Ziff Davis says the tech company has intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Zip Davis works, infringing on the

Starting point is 00:08:16 publishers' copyrights and diluting its trademarks. It claims that OpenAI used ZipDavis content to train its artificial intelligence models and generate responses through its popular chat-GPT chatbot. OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Zip Davis's intellectual property rights and the law, the complaint says. Executives at Zip Davis have been considering for months which path to take, one of the people said, the company decided to sue in part in the hope that other publishers would follow, end quote. Facebook is apparently going to reduce the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and make them ineligible for monetization after Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to what he called the OG Facebook. Quoting TechCrunch, Meta admits that some accounts on its platform try to game the algorithm to increase views or gain unfair monetization advantages, which results in spammy content flooding users' feeds.

Starting point is 00:09:13 To remedy this, it's cracking down on accounts that exhibit certain types of spammy behavior. This type of behavior includes accounts that share content with long captions alongside an excessive number of hashtags. It also includes accounts that post content with captions that are unrelated to the content, such as an image of a dog with a caption about airplane facts. Meta says that while the intention behind these sorts of posts isn't always malicious, it does lead to spammy content that ends up overshadowing original content from creators. Facebook will also target spam networks that create hundreds of networks to share the same spammy content, making them eligible for monetization. The crackdown on spammy content comes as AI slop is becoming a serious problem across social media platforms, including

Starting point is 00:09:56 Facebook. The company told TechCrunch that its crackdown is not targeting AI slop directly, but notes that accounts engaging in spammy behavior while also sharing that type of content will be impacted. Facebook says it's aware of the concerns around AI slop, cluttering users' feeds, and says it will address the issue as part of its broader focus on improving users' feeds. of today's announcement, Facebook also said that it will reduce the reach and visibility of comments that it detects as fake engagement. Plus, Facebook will start testing a comments feature that will allow users to signal which comments are irrelevant or don't fit in the context of the conversation, end quote. It's weird how many stories have surfaced recently about Zuck's desire to make

Starting point is 00:10:37 fetch happen, if you will, to revive Facebook, to make it relevant again, even at the cost of some of Meta's other properties. A second TechCrunch piece revealed this, quote, META CEO Mark Zuckerberg once considered deleting everyone's Facebook friends in an effort to boost the social network's cultural relevance. This, quote, potentially crazy idea, as the exec called it at the time, was revealed on Monday as part of the evidence introduced during the first day of the U.S. government's antitrust trial against Meta. In one message to meta employees in 2022, Zuckerberg proposed the strategy of wiping everyone's graphs and having them start again as a possible solution to Facebook's declining significance

Starting point is 00:11:16 in the social networking space. The idea was that forcing everyone to recreate their friends' graphs could encourage users to reconnect with the social network as they rebuild their social connections. Others at Meta, including the head of Facebook, Tom Allison, pushed back on the plan and ultimately the strategy was never implemented. However, the evidence presented in the trial revealed that Zuckerberg had considered other strategies to maintain his company's relevance, including shifting Facebook from a friends-based model to a follower-based model. That also never came to be, end quote. Roller released new updated Razor phones, which will include Perplexity's AI search engine

Starting point is 00:12:00 as part of a distribution partnership that lets Perplexity gain users rather than revenue. But I'm also interested in the phones themselves. There are three new Razor models, actually, including the $1,300 Razor Ultra Flip Phone with a 7-inch inner and 4-inch outer screen and a wood option. This is shipping May 15th, quoting the verge. Here's the thing, though, wood-grain back panel. The Ultra gets some fun new finishes, including a real wood back panel that's giving MotoX vibes.

Starting point is 00:12:31 More wood gadgets, please. There's also something called Alcantara that you may have seen once upon a time on a Microsoft surface. It's a synthetic fabric with a kind of suede feel and comes in a dark green that I really dig, too. The altar also comes in a textured deep red finish and a magenta-ish pink that looks at home on the razor line. All three phones come with an updated hinge that uses titanium rather than stainless steel,

Starting point is 00:12:56 and Motorola says it's four times stronger than the previous design. It also reduces the inner screen crease when the phone is flipped open. I never found the crease too bothersome to start with, but it practically disappears on these new phones, and you can barely feel it under your finger. of spooky, end quote. Netflix is rolling out subtitles with just spoken dialogue without audio cues or speaker names. And it is doing this, it says, because around 50% of U.S. viewing hours happen with

Starting point is 00:13:30 subtitles or captions on. Quoting The Verge. Before this change, Netflix offered subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, which show spoken dialogue along with speaker names and descriptions of sounds, such as phone buzzing or dramatic music swells. The new option drops these audio cues. It is currently available in English, and you'll only see it with new Netflix original titles for now, starting with Season 5 of you. However, Netflix spokesperson Dorian Rosenberg tells the verge that the streamer is actively exploring ways to expand this option to existing titles over time. You can find the new dialog-only subtitle option by heading to Netflix's language picker while watching a supported title, choosing the English tab, and then selecting the English option.

Starting point is 00:14:15 also see Netflix's existing option, English CC, which shows dialogue and audio cues, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, we said that YouTube just turned 20, and actually the Apple Watch is turning 10. So in honor of that, from Wired, a look at how Apple reshaped the watch industry and ushered in a new era of fitness tracking, quote. Prior to the Apple Watch, smartwatches were conceived as a kind of wrist-based mini smartphone to ping you with notifications or take calls off your wrist. David Narjano, Associate Director of Counterpoint Research, noted in a phone call with Wired that Apple's success in this category was largely due to completely changing the watch's use case, from being a smart watch to being a smart watch with a dedicated

Starting point is 00:15:07 health and fitness aspect. Fitbit and others had an ecosystem of apps, but there were other things they were not able to do, Narzano said. Apple built out the ecosystem and made the health care story very strong. Not only did the company focus on fitness and heart rate, it went beyond fitness and looked at a much deeper level of health care. That's where Apple excelled, end quote. In 2022, nearly 80% of Apple iPhone owners also owned an Apple Watch, and it accounted for 56% of smartwatch sales in the North American market. Most importantly, research suggests most people who own an Apple Watch are pretty satisfied with their device, end quote. And from Bloomberg, the race to fix aging computer systems heats up with AI's help. Quote, Mudrovich specializes in mainframe technology involving

Starting point is 00:15:55 computers tracing their roots to the dawn of the digital age and the ancient software that sometimes runs on them, upgrading such systems as painstaking work, often entailing sifting through millions of lines of code to understand how specific functions operate. Mudrovich, an IT consultant, compares it to archaeology. But the work is getting easier thanks to the widening use of generative artificial intelligence to do some of the heavy lifting. AI systems, work like that smart, very experienced, very wise old colleague who knows everything, Moodrovich, whose team recently deployed such tools to help speed up modernizing the pension system of a European government agency. As much as 70% of software used by Fortune 500 companies

Starting point is 00:16:32 was developed at least two decades ago, according to a December report from McKinsey. Global financial institutions alone are expected to spend some $57 billion maintaining legacy payments systems in 2008, research firm IDC estimates. That's almost equivalent to last year's net income at JPMorgan Chase and Company, the biggest U.S. bank. You'd be surprised how many firms are still on COBOL, even banks globally, said Gorkansari, a senior partner at McKinsey. The consultancy has developed a dedicated AI tool called LegacyX to help clients,

Starting point is 00:17:05 including banks, remove obsolete code and revamp their systems. Engineers have started using AI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft's Git, GitHub, and GitHub. Hub co-pilot and IBM's Watson X to make the process of maintaining and upgrading old systems easier and quicker. Instead of going through it line by line, a programmer can upload or copy and paste large blocks of code into an AI tool, along with natural language prompts like what does this COBOL program do? The AI can then explain how the code works and how different parts fit together and even translate old computer languages into more modern ones like Java, end quote. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/25 – Zuck Trying To Make Fetch Happen

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