Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/21 - Google Abandons Tablets

Episode Date: June 21, 2019

Google is getting out of the tablet business, there’s a MacBook Pro recall but not because of keyboard issues, a startup is aiming to disrupt the billable hour in the legal space, the world’s “first” electric plane is here, and, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Castro Lighstream.com/ride Links: Google's officially done making its own tablets (Computerworld) GOOGLE WAS NEVER REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT TABLETS (The Verge) Apple launches recall program for select MacBook Pros due to battery safety concerns (9to5Mac) FASTEST MOBILE NETWORKS 2019 (PC Mag) The boring genius of how Atrium kills legal busy work (TechCrunch) Why the age of electric flight is finally upon us (BBC News) The Weekend Longreads Suggestions: THEY WELCOMED A ROBOT INTO THEIR FAMILY, NOW THEY’RE MOURNING ITS DEATH (The Verge) Apple, Google, and Facebook Are Raiding Animal Research Labs (Bloomberg Businessweek) How Much of Google’s Search Traffic is Left for Anyone But Themselves? (SparkToro) Don’t Know Which Toaster to Buy? There’s a Website for That. (The Ringer) Using CRISPR to resurrect the dead (CNet) The fake French minister in a silicone mask who stole millions (BBC News) Subscribe to the ad-free feed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Tech Meme Ride Home for Friday, June 21st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google is getting out of the tablet business. There's a MacBook Pro recall, but not because of keyboard issues. A startup is aiming to disrupt the billable hour in the legal space. The world's first electric plane is here, and of course the weekend Longreed's suggestions are here. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Google is officially getting out of the tablet business. Do not expect any new picture. slates to be forthcoming because the company is going to focus exclusively on laptops and smartphones going forward in its hardware efforts.

Quoting Computer World, the company did have two smaller-sized tablets under development, and earlier this week it decided to drop all work on those devices and make its roadmap revolve entirely around laptops instead. A couple of clarifying points here. First, none of this has any impact on pixel phones. Pixel phones and pixel computers are two different departments, and the roadmapping question is related exclusively to the latter. The same applies to the various Google Home slash Nest products.

What we're talking about today has absolutely zero impact on any of that stuff. And second, when Google talks about a tablet, it means a device that detaches completely from a keyboard base or doesn't even have a physical keyboard in the first place. Not a swiveling two-and-one convertible like the pixel book. The pixel book, with its attached keyboard and 360-degree hinge, falls under Google's definition of laptop. Blurred lines, baby, end quote. This news was apparently only broken internally to actual Google employees on Wednesday. And according to Dieter Bone at the verge, Google was never really all that serious about tablets anyway.

Quote, tablets simply aren't a priority for Google. Not being a company-wide priority isn't necessarily a problem for most consumer products. Lots of little experiments at Google find success. But I think that when you're trying to build a platform, not being a priority is the same as unbeing. It's a death sentence. It has meant that there has never been enough effort put towards solving the software problems that have sunk all of Google's tablet efforts. The first and most obvious is the one everybody always cites. The apps were never really redesigned for big screens, end quote. Two points here. First, this does nothing to help Google's reputation for never really

standing behind any project. Remember the refrain, never depend on Google to support a service or a product forever or even for five years. Remember this popped up recently around the stadia launch. Gaming developers are rightfully wondering how much to invest in the new platform because Google is so notoriously flaky. But second, for all of those tablet stands who still to this day go on and on about how tablets are the future of computing, what does it say about this form factor and industry if only Apple and Microsoft remain fully committed to the tablet game? Like, I'm not saying tablets are going away anytime soon, but do tablets still feel like the future of anything to you at the moment? Apple has launched a voluntary recall and replacement program for 15-inch MacBook Pro units sold between September 2015 and February 2017 due to battery safety concerns.

Basically, there is a risk the batteries on these units could overheat. Quote, Apple has launched a new support page where users can go to check their MacBook Pro serial number to see if it's affected. Here's how to check if you have a MacBook Pro that falls into that window. To confirm which model you have, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu in the upper left corner of your screen. If you have MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch mid-2015, enter your computer's serial number on the program page to see if it is eligible for a battery replacement, end quote.

I think I've mentioned it on the show before. But when the modern MacBook Pro started coming out, I quickly maxed. out one of those old-style models with completely top of the line for every spec that I could think of in hopes that I could future-proof myself for at least five years. And I'm glad I did, because not only do I still have actual USB-3 ports, I have two Thunderbolt ports and an HD-Port, which is how I can run those two external monitors with ease. I've got an SD card slot. I've got MagSafe. I've got an actual keyboard with real keys that don't break. But mostly, I've just a machine that is actually still useful as a podcast producing machine. You'll be happy to know

that I checked the serial number on this machine and it is not affected, which is good for all of us because I don't know how I'd do with a temporary replacement unit or if I had to go without this machine for the one to two weeks that Apple says would be required to get a replacement. Although getting a brand new battery would actually maybe allow this machine to last longer. so maybe I didn't get lucky after all. After five years of Verizon holding the crown, PC Magazine's annual test conducted in 30 cities across 25 states has named AT&T as the fastest mobile network in the U.S. Quote, it turns out that a key step towards 5G requires improving your 4G network. AT&T's initial 5G network uses short-distance millimeter wave airwaves, so to prevent its 5G customers from feeling like they're falling off a cliff,

where there's no 5G service, it needed to turn up the quality of its 4G. And so it did. AT&T has also secretly been helped by improvements in smartphone modems over the past two years. Wireless spectrum forms the lanes on which all smartphone traffic travels, and AT&T has more LTE spectrum than T-Mobile or Verizon, according to Fierce Wireless. But AT&T's spectrum is typically highly fragmented, coming in many small pieces rather than a few large chunks. new modems are better able to aggregate a lot of small channels into one fast connection, which is working to AT&T's advantage, end quote. PCMag wants to stress, quote, AT&T's win does not mean that T-Mobile or Verizon have

worse networks than last year. All four major networks improved on both speed and reliability. It's just that AT&T improved more than the others, end quote. Atrium is a startup in the legal space that has raised seven, $75 million from the likes of Andresen Horowitz to basically take the busy work out of lawyering. Essentially, think of it as legal paperwork as a service. For startups, quote, Atrium Records acts like your searchable legal dropbox.

The startup works with your last law firm to ingest your documents around equity, taxes, employees, and IP, and make sure they're all up to date. Machine learning extracts critical data about financings and cap tables, so that's instantly available in the Atrium dashboard, and you don't have to dig into the original docs. Plus, you don't have to pay for lawyers or paralegals to do that manually. And your lawyer can build a task list of documents for you to edit or sign so you always know what to do next, which is a relief when you're wrangling approvals from all your existing investors.

Atrium hiring operationalizes one of the biggest founder time sucks. Instead of writing hiring contracts from scratch each time, you fill out a form and use menu selections to set the salary, share count, vesting schedule, and offer expiration. Looking across its anonymized data set of contracts, Atrium can recommend the best clauses and most common setups, like four-year vesting with one-year cliffs. You can see the status of the contracts every step of the way from drafting and finalizing to getting employees to accept, end quote. If you've ever gone through the startup process, you know how many billable hours can be racked up just from shuffling documents like these around. Atrium's fundraising concierge service has already helped startups with raising more than one big. billion dollars from seed rounds of 200,000 all the way up through 50 million dollars rounds.

At this week's Paris Air Show and Israeli Company has unveiled the world's first all-electric plane, quoting from the BBC. Aviation says the craft called Alice will carry nine passengers up to 650 miles at 10,000 feet at 276 miles per hour. It is expected to enter service in 2022. Two, Alice is an unconventional looking craft, powered by three rear-facing pusher propellers, one in the tail and two counter-rotating props at the wingtips to counter the effects of drag. It also has a flat lower fuselage to a lift. This plane looks like this, not because we wanted to build a cool plane, but because it's electric,

says Eviation's chief executive Omer Bar-Yohei. You build a craft around your propulsion system. Electric means we can have lightweight motors. It allows us to open up the design space, end quote. Eviation has already received its first orders. U.S. Regional Airline Cape Air, which operates a fleet of 90 aircraft, has agreed to buy a double-digit number of the aircraft. So why might Electric be the future for planes, at least of a certain size? We'll try this sample math on for size.

A small aircraft, like a turboprop Sessna caravan, will use $400 on conventional fuel for a 100-mile flight, says Aviation C. Roy Gansarski. But with electricity, quote, it'll be between $8 and $12, which means much lower costs per flight hour. Quote, we're not an environmentalist company. The reason we're doing this is because it makes business sense, end quote. Time for the weekend long reads suggestions. Actually, you know that I have kids because every week in my head I want to do that in the cadence of the Doc McStuffin's song. time for your long reads time for your long reads anyway first up i can't remember if i did a story on this before or not but gibo was a social robot which raised 76 million dollars over the course of its lifetime to ship eight hundred ninety nine dollars robots to the public for use in their homes quote gbo sat in williams's bedroom on his desk where every day it greeted him in the

morning and ran through the weather and his calendar. Williams 44 asked Gibo questions, requested music, and played its games. Gibo couldn't do much, really, but its most redeeming feature, the one that cemented it as a robot darling in its owner's heart was its facial recognition. Unlike a Google Home or an Amazon Echo, Gibo noticed every time Williams entered the room and swiveled its head to say hello or crack a joke. A display on its face might have shown a heart or animated clouds and the sun. People would always try to compare him to a lexon. People would always try to compare him to a but his winning trait is his personality, William says. Yes, some people say it's creepy with the eyes and looking at you, but it's not threatening, end quote.

But then, earlier this year, the company behind Gibo was acquired. Users were notified that Gibo's servers were going dark. Essentially, this sort of companion, almost robot pet that people invited into their homes, was becoming a brick. Quoting from the piece again, now Gibo owners are scrambling to save their friend. explain the death to their children and come to grips with the mortality of a robot designed to bond with them not to die." Bloomberg looks at how Apple, Google, and Facebook are rating animal research labs for talent. Why? Well, it turns out that the neuroscience behind the brains of birds, mice, and fish, might have implications for AI, for self-driving cars, for a whole lot of things.

So some neuroscientists are being snapped up for seven-figure salaries, quote, animals have long played important roles in advancing corporate science, of course, particularly for medical treatments, but the leap required to translate insights from the zebra finches sound processing, anatomy into series voice recognition software, or mouse gaming into a future where Amazon runs all Android warehouses is of an entirely different order. With whole new industries at stake, the race to unlock the secrets of the animal mind is getting weird, end quote. I spoke recently about how little searching actually leads people to the open web from Google search anymore. Well, Rand Fishkin actually crunched some hard numbers, if you're curious. Dive into the data if interested, but TLDR, 48.96% of searches on Google are zero-click searches.

Either the person gets the answer they need from Google itself or they just don't click through on anything. Only 41.45% of clicks go to organic non-Google sites. And here's where it gets interesting. 3.58% of clicks go to paid links to the ads. But even more than that, 5.9% of searches result in organic clicks going to Google's own properties. Google Maps, Google sites, Google News, Google Play, Google Images, etc. Interesting implications for the antitrust concern brigade. If you're like me, then when you're, you're like me, then when you're,

you're looking to buy a product, you don't go to Google, you turn to a trusted review site, like wirecutter or the strategist. The ringer has an interesting look at the history and industry of, essentially, if I'm going to buy a water bottle, tell me which is the best one. If I'm going to buy a sub-thousand-dollar TV, which is the best one? In a way, these sorts of sites have become so successful, it's becoming a bit of a problem. Quote, in the past few years, affiliate-powered recommendation verticals have grown so numerous that they become as hard to parse as the vast shopping expanse they were meant to simplify. Publications that feature a form of the business include, but are not limited to the New York Times, USA Today, BuzzFeed, Gizmodo, The Verge, Popular

Science, CNN, New York Magazine, Business Insider, CNet, Digital Trends, and the conservative news site, The Daily Caller. On top of that, a handful of SEO-friendly outposts have materialized. Tom's Guide, Best Products.com, Bestreviews.com, reviews.com, reviews.com. OutdoorgearLab.com and TechgearLab.com, to name a few. These sites all have their own set of testing standards and style, meaning that they rarely share a consensus of the superior version of any appliance, gadget, or doohickey. Googling Best Air Friar is not a path to enlightenment, but into a spiral of comparison between publications.

Observers of this phenomenon have even begun sarcastically recommending recommendation sites. There is now yet another layer of noise to dig through. which review sites are honorable and which are not, end quote. And you know that I find CRISPR fascinating, even though I don't really understand the science of it. So with gene editing breakthroughs like CRISPR, we are getting close to having the ability to bring extinct species like woolly mammoths back from the dead. But should we? This is some actual, factual, real-life Jurassic Park stuff here. Paging Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Yeah, yeah, but your scientist. We're so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. And finally, this is not a tech story, but I was just fascinated by it. Check out the story from the BBC about the identity thief who stole $90 million by impersonating a French defense minister. Quote, for two years from late 2015, an individual or individuals impersonating France's defense minister, Jean-Eves Le Drian, scammed an estimated 80 million euro from wealthy victims, including the Aga Khan and the owner of Chateau Margot Wines. The hustle required targets to believe they were being contacted by Mr. Ledrian, who then requested financial help to pay ransoms for journalists being held hostage by

Islamists in the Middle East. Since France officially does not pay ransoms to hostage takers, the fake Ledrian assured payments could not be traced and asked for the funds to be placed in a bank in China. Many of those approached smelled a rat and rang off, but some didn't. Enough for it to become one of the most outlandish and successful rackets of recent times, end quote. That's all for today and for this week. Two great weekend bonus episodes this weekend, one, a deep dive into the details of Project Libra and the other, a wrap-up of E3, and where gaming is at right now generally. Talk to y'all on Monday.