Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/05 - Apple Waves the White Flag on Keyboards?

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

A Superhuman mea culpa, no mea culpa but Apple might be ready to tacitly admit the butterfly keyboards were a mistake, inside Walmart’s turf battles over ecommerce, HQ Trivia lays off staff, and the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: CognitoHQ.com Tiny.website Firesideconf.com/ride Links: Read Statuses (Superhuman) Kuo: Apple to include new scissor switch keyboard in 2019 MacBook Air and 2020 MacBook Pro (9to5Mac) HQ Trivia lays off ~20% as it preps subscriptions (TechCrunch) Inside the conflict at Walmart that’s threatening its high-stakes race with Amazon (Recode) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The Real Cloud Wars: The $6 Billion Battle Over The Future Of Weather Forecasting (Forbes) Catalyst deep dive: The future of Mac software according to Apple and devs (Ars Technica) Android Q(&A): Android Engineers take us on a deep dive of Android Q (Ars Technica) How To Game Google To Make Negative Results Disappear (BuzzFeed News) Hayflick limit (QZ) Books Recommendations: The Dog Stars Orphan X 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 Techmeme right home for Friday, July 5th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a superhuman mayaculpa. No maya culpa, but Apple might be ready to tacitly admit the butterfly keyboards were a mistake. Inside Walmart's turf battles over e-commerce, HQ trivia lays off staff, and of course

the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Let it never be said that this podcast traffics only in controversy. in the scandalous headline, but never bothers to follow up and cover the apology, or at least the Danumont, to a previously mentioned controversy. Shortly after, I added my two cents to the whole superhuman brouhaha on Wednesday, Superhuman CEO Rahul Vora reacted to the controversy. Vora wrote on Medium that Superhuman will remove location tracking, will delete collected location data is turning read statuses off on emails by default, and we'll build a new option to disable remote images, which allowed the sort of privacy issues people were complaining

about. Quoting Vora, and note that I'm pulling from several sections of his medium post, but maintaining the chronological order of what I'm about to quote, quote, When we built superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for, for not thinking through this more fully. It made sense for read statuses to be on by default when our user base was early adopters. They knew exactly what they were buying and were excited to buy it. However, over the last few days, I have heard from some recent users that they felt enabled to track people by accident.

I am very sorry for this. Also, our goal has only ever been to create joyful, magical, and delightful experiences. We should have realized that the expectations of our software would change as our audience changed. Business tools such as superhuman are constantly becoming more powerful, and all else being equal, the market will generally buy the most powerful tools it can. I therefore think that we, as an industry, should agree to the level of information that we track and show in our products. If one of us creates something new and that innovation becomes popular, then market dynamics

will pull us all in that direction. This is how we ended up with location tracking inside of superhuman, mix, max, yes wear, streak, and many others. not to mention nearly every CRM and marketing automation platform. At Superhuman, we aspire to help people experience joy and productivity in their email. The team and I will continue to dedicate ourselves to this. In addition, I now recognize that we must deeply consider the overall ecosystem when designing software as fundamental as email.

The team and I are committed to this now more than ever. We need to consider not only our customers, but also future users, the people they communicate with, and the Internet at large, end quote. So look, credit where due. This is a thoughtful, reasoned, coherent, cogent response and reassessment, which is, I think, pretty much all the critics were asking for, really. Might I have a shot at buying another MacBook Pro someday in the future after all? I might, because famed Apple analyst Ming Chi Quo is out with a report that says that Apple might abandon the butterfly keyboard design that has been so universally criticized in favor of a new, I guess I should say new is in quotes,

scissors switch keyboard, hopefully offering not only greater durability, little specks of dust will no longer screw up your keyboard, but also, and this is most crucial to me, longer key travel. So huge good news if true, basically they're admitting the butterfly keyboard design was a mistake, and they're going back to something like they used to have. Bad news? It might only be coming first to a MacBook Air refresh expected later this year and might not come to MacBook Pros until they get a refresh in 2020 at the earliest. Quoting Benjamin Mayo at 9 to 5 Mac.

The new Cizzer Switch keyboard is a whole new design than anything previously seen in a MacBook, purportedly featuring glass fiber to reinforce the keys. Apple fans who have bemoaned the butterfly keyboard should be optimistic about return to scissors switches. Quo says that Apple's butterfly design was expensive to manufacture due to low yields. The new keyboard is still expected to cost more than the average laptop keyboard, but it should be cheaper than the butterfly components. Apple has introduced four generations of butterfly keyboards in as many years, attempting to address user complaints about stuck keys, repeated key inputs, and even loud clackiness of typing when striking each key cap.

It most recently debuted what it described as a third-generation, butterfly keyboard with new materials in the 2019 MacBook Pro. The jury is still out as to whether that laptop suffers from the same key reliability problems, but even if the issue is resolved, the butterfly keyboard is not universally popular. A scissor switch keyboard with more travel will be greatly welcomed, end quote. Can't resist, quoting some of the snark around this one. Eric Corey, quote, now bring back the magnetic charger, the head. headphone jack and the escape key.

Lori Voss, quote, we're not saying you're right or that it was garbage, but we are changing our keyboards back to how they were before and calling it innovation. And great friend of the pod, Glenn Fleischman tweeted this haiku of a one-act play. Scene, Tim Cook's office. Cook, Johnny, it's time to kill the butterfly.

I've. Either it stays or I go, end quote. We haven't checked in with HQ trivia in a while, but TechCrunch says the news is not good, saying that the company laid off about 20% of its staff this week and that downloads per month for the HQ apps are down a whopping 92% versus June of last year, according to Censor Tower. But, quoting TechCrunch, rather than solely monetizing a waning audience via in-app purchases and sponsorships, HQ Words announced it would debut a $9.99 per month subscription sometime this month that would grant access to winning, quote, bigger prizes. This could be a smart way to squeeze more dollars out of a smaller but more diehard audience. While HQ trivia was an inspiring approach to mobile gaming, its twice daily games didn't fit the always-on nature of mobile.

It's failed to build a proper onboarding experience that gives users a taste of its games right away rather than forcing them to wait for the next scheduled match as we suggested over a year ago. Gammers are fickle, craving instant gratification, and HQ hasn't tried to meet them in the middle, end quote. Jason Delray in Recode has an amazing piece that you can treat as a long read if you want, or just a news item. Apparently, Walmart is projecting losses of more than $1 billion for its U.S. e-commerce division this year, on revenue of between $21 and $22 billion. You may recall that a few years ago, Walmart bought online retailer jet.com and brought in jet founder Mark Lurie to basically supercharge Walmart's online efforts. And so far, at least from the outside, seemingly, so good.

Walmart's U.S. online sales increased 40% last year alone. Walmart's share of e-commerce grew to 4.7% up from 2.6% three years ago. Amazon, of course, now accounts for 38% of online retail, up from 32% three years ago, and Walmart's stock price has responded accordingly up 40% last year alone. But behind the scenes, Del Rey paints the classic picture of a new guy coming in to shake things up at a company and the incumbent interests increasingly fighting him every step of the way. Reading between the lines, it seems like Lori might be hounded out of the company due to fierce internal politics. bottom line as analysts have said for years all those huge warehouses that amazon has spent 20 years building the very ones that it kept reinvesting money in instead of taking profits as all the analysts told us their amazon's competitive moat quote lorry has aggressively pitched the company's management and board

on the idea that walmart needs to spend billions a year on new warehouses if it's going to seriously compete online with the everything store and its speedy delivery offerings source say. Amazon has 110 fulfillment centers in the U.S. while Walmart has 20 at most. Walmart's in-store selection is also not large enough to use stores to fulfill online general merchandise orders at a scale that could rival Amazon's product catalog. The problem is that building the online version of an everything store requires millions more products, and that means two things that Walmart's current infrastructure does not support, dozens more e-commerce warehouses and a lot more merchants and brands selling through Walmart.com.

The former is mainly a cash problem, as in you need to spend a lot of cash to build a warehouse network to rival Amazon's. But Walmart has not secured the same trust and long leash from Wall Street investors that Amazon has. Amazon, on the other hand, has literally been building out its warehouse infrastructure for two whole decades, and it can offset its losses from expensive investments via high-profit businesses like Amazon Web Services and its fast-growing advertising business. Walmart has mostly rebuffed lorries and treaties for new warehouse spending, in part because of how much deeper into the red the investments would put the e-commerce business over the next few years, end quote.

Time for the weekend long read suggestions. Let's start with something that I think we've touched on in the past, but if you think the Cloud Wars are about cloud computing and AWS and Google and IBM and Microsoft, think again because there is another. cloud war going on. Weather forecasting is a $6 billion a year market and there has been some intense battles going on to own the future of it. Quote, for decades, private weather forecasting has been a cozy industry dominated in the U.S. by Accuweather, the weather company, founded as the Weather Channel in 1982 and bought by IBM for $2.3 billion in 2016, and DTN, which focuses on industrial concerns and was purchased by a Swiss holding company for $900 million in 20, But now a perfect storm of macro trends, ever cheaper processing power, cloud computing, vastly improved AI, and a proliferation of low-cost sensors, has opened up the field to a fresh crop of ambitious startups.

In aggregate, they have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors who think the incumbents look vulnerable to creative new business models. They are fighting over a big and growing pie. Recent numbers are hard to come by, but a 2013 article from the Wharton School estimated that overall revenues for climate and weather companies were about, $3 billion and that in aggregate the industry was worth some $6 billion. A 2017 report from the National Weather Service included a prediction that the sector could quintuple in size, end quote. And a couple of deep dives applicable to certain types of developers. Ars Technica has a deep dive into catalyst and tries to ascertain what the future of Mac's

software and Apple software generally will look like because of it and also what users can expect. And ours also interviewed a bunch of Android engineers to do a deep dive of Android Q and what users can expect from that platform going forward. Next, think of it as inverse SEO. This has actually been going on for some time now, but BuzzFeed News looks into the industry of reputation consultants who are paid to make negative online content such as search results, everything from arrests to poor customer reviews, disappear. Quote, quote, A BuzzFeed News investigation has found examples of executives, doctors, criminals, and even a Russian oligarch, all benefiting from search engine manipulation campaigns to suppress negative content.

As for the reputation industry, practitioners who spoke to BuzzFeed News described it as in anything goes field, lacking clear industry standards or ethical guidelines. The irony is that the reputation industry suffers from its own perception issues. It's a pretty fly-by-night kind of industry because what does it take to be a reputational management professional? A website? said Brandon Hopkins, the owner of reputation firm's Diamond Links, and After Him Media, end quote. Polygon has a feature up about Halo 2 and how it's the template we now take for granted for how players are matched online to do battle and basically any networked gaming environment. So, cool bit of history, you think, but it's a deeper story about game design, product design, and how researchers and user experience experts can sometimes, get it wrong. In short, sometimes you have to trust your guts, not your data. Quote,

this is a story about a time when I failed to be a good profit, where my attempts to project research data into the future led to a conflict between the research team at Microsoft and the design team at Bungy. Usually, public discussions about games user research focus on the times we were right, the times the data fixed game design. This story is one of the other times when two otherwise competent researchers drew the wrong conclusions about an innovative piece of game design and made bad recommendations and how the game succeeded in spite of that. And finally today, I'm just going to give you a rabbit hole that I went down recently. Have you ever heard of the Hayflick limit?

Quote, in the 1950s, the morale of cell biologists was low. Existing research, specifically work from a French surgeon named Alexis Carroll, suggested that any cell line, including human tissue, should be able to grow in a line forever. It was somehow the biologist's fault that in vitro cell cultures kept dying. This problem didn't initially concern Leonard Hayflick, a biologist who was studying how viruses trigger cancer at the cellular level. But while working to prepare fetal tissue cell cultures for researchers at the Wistar Institute, a research center in Philadelphia, he noticed something strange. All of the samples seemed to

stop dividing after they had divided 50 or 60 times. They'd live for a little while longer in culture, and then they died, no matter what. Hayflick had stumbled onto something fundamental about the majority of human cells. They're programmed to die after a certain number of replications through a process called apoptosis. Since then, researchers have found that other types of animal cells seem to have their own Hayflick limits, which may be related to their lifespans. limits of any kind have always taunted humanity. If we could push the Hayflik limit further, could we slow down aging or even cheat death, end quote?

This is one of those pieces from Quartz that is divided into multiple segments. So don't go read the first segment and be like, gee, that was quick. Brian picked a short one to end with. Keep scrolling down because there's like a dozen segments in the whole piece with data points and graphics and a whole bunch of stuff. We're talking about the science of cheating death here, people. Don't give up too soon.

That's all for this week. Quick reminder if this weekend you're heading out to a cabin or the woods or a lake or something like that to kick back. Don't forget to consider joining me out in the woods at the fireside conference in September. Reservations made exclusively available to TechMeme Ride Home listeners can be yours at FiresideConf.com.com forward slash ride. And if you are at the lake or at the beach this weekend or any time coming up and you're looking to kick back with a good book, I don't know why this has happened, but I've been on a fiction binge reading jag of late. That's unusual for me as I tend to only read nonfiction in history. But as I told you, I burned right through that first law trilogy.

And then last week, I absolutely devoured two more books. I loved first the dog stars by Peter Heller. It's a post-apocalyptic story, but it's not as gruesome or depressing as The Walking Dead or even Cormick McCarthy's The Road, for that matter. And then just last night, I stayed up till one to finish Greg Hurwitz's Orphan X, the first book in his Orphan X series. This one is actually way out of my lane. It's a sort of spy, assassin, crime thriller sort of book. the type that I never read. But I did read the Bourne books when I was a kid, and of course I loved those movies, love John Wick. And Orphinex is sort of like that, basically a Jason

Bourne type mixed with Batman because he's Jason Bourne, but he uses his assassin abilities to do good vigilante stuff. Look, it's not Shakespeare, but it is better than most of this type of book, and it's completely digestible in a fun junk food sort of way. It reads fast and goes down easy. So check that out if you need a mindless, breezy beach read. Check out the special two weekend bonus episodes this weekend also. And I'll talk to you again on Monday.