Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/24 - iFixit Tears Down the MacBook Keyboard Tweaks

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 TechMeme right home for Friday, May 24th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Facebook cryptocurrency could be here in about six months. SpaceX launches its first batch of internet satellites. I Fix It Tears down the MacBook keyboard tweaks. The robots are coming for Major League Baseball

Starting point is 00:00:53 umpires and a supersized weekend Longreads segment. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Further confirmation that a Facebook coin is coming. it's actually coming quite soon, in fact, as soon as Q1 of next year, according to the BBC, who I'm going to quote from now. The social media giant wants to start testing its cryptocurrency, which has been referred to internally as global coin by the end of this year. Facebook is expected to outline plans in more detail this summer and has already spoken to Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Founder Mark Zuckerberg met Mr. Carney last month to discuss the opportunities and risks involved in launching a cryptocurrency. Facebook has also sought advice on operational and regulatory issues from officials at the U.S. Treasury. The firm is also in talks with money transfer firms, including Western Union, as it looks for cheaper and faster ways for people without a bank account to send and receive money, end quote. The internal code name for this whole business is, apparently, for those of you keeping track, Project Libra. SpaceX has successfully launched its first batch of 60, Starlink satellites out of the nearly 11,000 planned to go into a low Earth orbit to provide

Starting point is 00:02:16 global internet connectivity, quoting from Geekwire. After two postponements, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket executed a mission that dealt out 60 Starlink broadband data satellites in low Earth orbit. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida right on time at 10.30 p.m. Eastern time 7.30 p.m. Pacific Last night, a little more than an hour after launch, the flat panel satellites which were built at SpaceX's development facility in Redmond, Washington, floated away from the Falcon 9's second stage and spread themselves out like a deck of cards. The Falcon 9's soot-stained, twice used first stage booster, rose from the launch pad, and

Starting point is 00:02:58 separated from the second stage minutes after liftoff. The booster flew itself back down on a drone ship called, of course, I still love you, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, the second stage, pressed on to orbit, shooting for satellite deployment at an altitude of 440 kilometers or 273 miles. SpaceX made use of an unorthodox deployment method that involved having the stack of 60 satellites slowly disperse. After their release, the satellites are designed to use their onboard Krypton ion drives to raise their orbits to the prescribed 550 kilometer or 342 mile altitude. At least, That's what Elon Musk is betting on.

Starting point is 00:03:39 Quote, it's possible that some of these satellites may not work, he told reporters last week. In fact, there's a small possibility that all of the satellites will not work, end quote. Well, I Fix It has a tear down of those new MacBook Pro keyboard tweaks. And the headline news is there is now a membrane with a new nylon-like material in the keyboard that might better repel dust, and a couple of other minor changes to the key switches that register presses. Will these tweaks work? Is our long national nightmare surrounding MacBook keyboards over? To be determined.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Quoting the verge, the first of I-Fix its discoveries is that Apple is, in fact, using a new material inside a component of the key inside the keyboard. There's a polymer over the actual keyboard switch that now appears to essentially be plain old nylon, according to a F-I-T-R analysis. Apple began using a silicone membrane inside the keyboard last year. The company insisted it was there to reduce noise despite patent filings and service documents

Starting point is 00:04:50 confirming that they were intended to protect against debris. This new material doesn't change that overall membrane, but instead this is a second kind of polymer that lies underneath it. The newer material is, quote, clearer and smooth to the touch, according to I-fix-it. though why the change might help is anybody's guess. Perhaps it's better not allowing dust to get stuck underneath it. At this point, only Apple really knows for sure. The second change is even more mysterious.

Starting point is 00:05:18 On Apple's butterfly keyboard, there's a metal dome switch underneath each key. It's the thing that makes the electrical contact that registers a key press. Apple appears to have made minor changes to these switches in the new keyboard. IFix it says that, quote, the difference in surface finish from the 2018 version to the 2019, indicates Apple may be using a revised heat treatment or alloy or possibly both, end quote. However, a full analysis of what's changed will require much more sophisticated equipment than IFix it currently has access to. Again, it's a question that Apple could answer at any time.

Starting point is 00:05:54 What does seem clear, however, is that these metal switches are likely the culprits for many, though probably not all of the keyboard failures people have been experiencing. They're just tiny and delicate. They work by popping down and pushing back up, like a really tiny jam lid or Snapple cap, I fix it notes. It's not hard to imagine the world's tiniest snapple lid deforming under the kind of stress. All laptop keyboards have to endure, end quote. That is all quoting from Dieter Bones's analysis in The Verge, of course. And as Dieter just noted, the whole reason this tear down was necessary was that Apple pointedly declined to outline the changes made to these most recent keyboards. But what is absolutely clear is that these are just tweaks. The fundamental design

Starting point is 00:06:39 on these keyboards remains unchanged. Apple seems to be willing to ride this particular design choice all the way to hell if they have to, which either indicates some future overall laptop design decision that Apple has made, that they're committed to, that we're not privy to yet, for which having the most minimal keyboard design possible is utmost, or else they're just incredibly stubborn, or I suppose both. See the tweet I read from Nilai Patel from earlier in the week. When we talk about robots coming for jobs,

Starting point is 00:07:19 I guess this is what we're talking about, because even umpires aren't safe, robot umpires might be coming to professional baseball, except they're not going to replace the umpires yet, just supplement them. Turns out that the Atlantic League is an independent East Coast baseball league where Major League Baseball seems to like to test out rule changes and new equipment. Last Thursday, at the ballparks where the Somerset Patriots play, which is Bridgewater, New Jersey, and the New Britain B's play, which is New Britain, Connecticut, they were testing out an

Starting point is 00:07:57 electronic radar system called Trackman, which was calling actual balls and strikes. The home plate umpires were still there, but they were fitted with earpieces so they could within a tenth of a second hear the trackman system's judgment on a pitch. Quoting from Axios, the umpires were told to still call their strike zone, leading to some confusion when their call didn't match trackmans. When this goes live next month, They'll be going with whatever Trackman says. Major League Baseball will be watching this experiment closely, and a few things they'll be looking for. How will hitters react when a pitch they think is a ball is called a strike by Trackman?

Starting point is 00:08:41 And how will pitchers react when the opposite is true? How easily can the zone be adjusted so that it's accurate from batter to batter depending on their height and batting stance? And most importantly, will umpires be invested enough in each pitch to fill the still important role of calling things like checked swings and managing the flow of the game, end quote. As Axios notes, there are other issues here, like, what does this mean for the umpires going forward? Like, maybe their jobs are getting easier because, you know, the bots will be making the calls.

Starting point is 00:09:13 They're just the relayer of the information. Or are their jobs now redundant? But also, what about catchers? You know how framing has become a super specialized and valued skill in? baseball. Does that go away now? Well, it's a holiday weekend here in the U.S., and actually, I just learned that it's a bank holiday in the U.K. as well. So if our download numbers are to be believed, that means that three quarters of you listening right now will have a long weekend ahead of you. Thus, I wanted to supersize the long reads today. But to do that, that means I'll

Starting point is 00:09:57 have to do less summarizing and quoting than I usually do in order to jam all of these in here. Let's start with some summaries of things we've been talking about. Reuters has a piece up looking behind the scenes at the efforts of the United States and the government of Australia to try to stoke this war on Huawei. And if you want a chef's kiss summation of why some people are like completely skeptical of WeWork, check out Ellen Hewitt's profile of WeWorks CEO Adam Newman in Bloomberg. Note that her name is Ellen, not Amy. You'll have to read to the end of that piece to get that joke. And Politico has a long piece up that says that far from curtailing the machinations of big tech platforms, GDPR has actually enabled the oligarchs to entrench their power, as a lot of critics of GDPR warned would happen.

Starting point is 00:10:50 In short, the big tech platforms are the only players that have the resources to comply fully with regulations like GDPR. So the unintended consequence is that these laws are building a defensive moat around, the established players while smaller tech companies struggle to comply with the regulations and their costs. Again, this is precisely what critics warned what happened. Mel Magazine has a look at a site that you don't hear about much anymore, but is very much still with us, the Pirate Bay. A lot of the major players from the 2000s era of piracy sites and technology have succumbed

Starting point is 00:11:26 to the legal pressures, but not the Pirate Bay. as one observer quotes in the piece. There's this legacy that the Pirate Bay has where it's grown into something more than the people who first operated the site. It's a phenomenon. There are people who are just ideologically committed to the operation of the Pirate Bay.

Starting point is 00:11:46 For as long as that's the case, it's going to be very, very hard to shut down, end quote. And Ray Finucane is a legendary engineer. Over the course of his life, he's flown supersonic jets in Florida, built a 33-acre island of ice in the Arctic Ocean and worked on hydrogen gas guns that could catapult satellites into orbit. His colleagues used to call him the wizard.

Starting point is 00:12:09 But his latest engineering project at age 75 is maybe his most challenging and most personal. Read about one inventor's race to manage his own Parkinson's disease with a smartphone app. And now a couple of deep dives that take a 30,000-foot view of some tech topics you hear a lot about. Fortune Magazine has a look at how IBM, Google, and Microsoft are all racing to make quantum computing a reality. This is another thing that people have been swearing to me is right around the corner for a long time now, and I've never known if it's just been wishful thinking or not. If you're not familiar with why quantum computing could be a huge, huge deal, this piece is a good primer. And this, in particular, is a good analogy,

Starting point is 00:12:54 quote, the potential is so enticing because a quantum computer is not just another ultra-fast computer. It's a new beast entirely. Instead of computing one thing after another, plotting along brute force style as regular computers do, quantum computers could potentially consider all scenarios simultaneously, like a monk who has attained nirvana through meditation, end quote. Also, we need something like quantum computing to come along and break through, because, you know, Moore's Law is almost dead. And on a tangential but potentially related topic, Popular Science asks the fundamental question,

Starting point is 00:13:33 this is the title of the piece, Can AI Escape Our Control and Destroy Us? If you want a shorter-than-book-length digest of all the fears about AI, this is the piece for you, and then Google Nick Bostrom and start reading some of his papers and books. And then these last two are sort of philosophical pieces, that I will quote from extensively. You might have seen this one on Hacker News.

Starting point is 00:13:59 The title is The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. If you've read that Chinese sci-fi novel, The Three Body Problem, you know the dark forest analogy. Well, Yancey Strickler extends that analogy to make a point that is obvious when you think about it. For all sorts of structural reasons,

Starting point is 00:14:17 we seem to all be moving to the dark forest corners of the Internet, away from sharing, away from the harsh light of scrutiny. Quote, dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity, as are other dark forests like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, we chat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with groups and trying to redefine the word privacy in the process. These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-indexed, non-endexed, non-exed, optimized and non-gamified environments. The cultures of these spaces have more in common with the

Starting point is 00:14:57 physical world than the internet, end quote. I'm not sure what the ultimate effect of what feels like a secular shift in behavior like this will be, but read the piece because it pokes at this notion just enough, and it feels dead right to me at the moment. And finally, Ross Schulman has a personal blog post up that is a manifesto similar to others that I've read in the past. But hey, never stop manifestoing, everybody. In short, this one is a call to arms to take back the internet from the platforms and the walled gardens. Quote, there is the potential today to reclaim control of our digital lives from monopolist platforms and unnecessary rent-seeking. There is a world within reach where always on, always-connected pocket computers become

Starting point is 00:15:45 personal data stores, all your photos, documents, messages, and other data live with you, not on a faceless server belonging to a random corporation. The only machine learning is done for you. Data only leaves your device because you want to send it somewhere. And here's what that future might look like, end quote. Please read this. It's another call to arms to make a truly decentralized computing environment where the client server model is fundamentally thrown out

Starting point is 00:16:14 in favor of a true peer-to-peer and node-based model where everything, processing, storage, machine learning, everything is done locally. And we can all collectively say, F the cloud, because that's really just another way for the man to enslave us. Again, this has been proposed before, but maybe this time we're getting closer to it being possible. A boy can dream, can't he? And believe me, this sounds like a really, really good dream. So yes, as I said, weekend holiday, this weekend for a lot of us. So first of all, that means I'm going to be taking another weekend break.

Starting point is 00:16:59 No weekend bonus episodes this weekend. And I probably won't record a day of episode on Monday. Now, that doesn't mean no episode on Monday because I've got a super cool episode I've been sitting on that digs deep into something tech folks are super obsessed about, but we don't talk about very much on this show. You'll have to wait until Monday to hear what that is, and I'll probably release it a bit early. But if something truly earth-shattering does happen on Monday, I will come in here and record a quick emergency day-of thing to cover it. Otherwise, you'll get this extra special episode, and otherwise, summer is here, so let's all just enjoy it.

Starting point is 00:17:42 And unless, I don't know, Tim Cook decides to run for president or something of that caliber of unexpected, I'll be talking to you. on Tuesday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/24 - iFixit Tears Down the MacBook Keyboard Tweaks

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