Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/10 – Kuo: Apple Silicon Macs Coming THIS Year

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, July 10th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, we could get our first Macs with Apple Silicon inside them as soon as this year. Apple glasses are still a ways away, but Foxcon is already making the lenses.

Starting point is 00:00:48 Feverish last-minute negotiations ahead of Peacock's arrival next week. The PC market is definitively not shrinking at the moment, thanks to COVID. And as always on Fridays, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Minchi Quo says that the first Macs with Apple Silicon inside of them could come this year. He thinks a 13-inch MacBook Pro will come this year with the new chips inside, and a MacBook Air will come either this year or in Q1 of 2021. Also, a 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro model will come sometime in 2021, quoting Mac rumors.

Starting point is 00:01:32 According to Apple analysts Mincii Quo, a 13.3-inchie-1, inch MacBook Pro with a form factor similar to the current 13.3-inch MacBook Pro could be the first Mac to get an arm-based chip designed by Apple. In March, Quo predicted this new MacBook Pro will launch in late 2020 or early 2021. In a research note with TF International Securities today, seen by Mac Rumors, Quo said he expects the Apple Silicon 13.3-inch MacBook Pro to go into mass production in the fourth quarter of this year, but he also now predicts we will see an arm-based MacBook Air either in the same quarter or in the first quarter of next year. Quo still believes that Apple intends to launch a mini-l-D 16-inch MacBook Pro and a 14.1-inch MacBook Pro, also with mini-l-D display. But these will

Starting point is 00:02:16 likely arrive in the second or third quarter of 2021, and intriguingly, both will have an, quote, all-new form factor design. Previous rumors suggested an updated 16-inch MacBook Pro could arrive this year in October or November. Quo made no mention in today's report of the Apple Silicon iMac, he previously predicted. Apple is still expected to launch a redesigned iMac this year, although it's not expected to be an Apple Silicon machine, end quote. Also on the Apple rumor tip, the information is reporting that it's full speed ahead for some version of an Apple Glass product. Apple is apparently making thousands of semi-transparent lenses for its AR headset at a Foxcon factory as part of an engineering validation test for the product.

Starting point is 00:03:08 Quote, the lenses are at least one to two years away from mass production, and the same is likely true of the AR product they ultimately end up in, the person said. The product must still go through a lengthy process of ramping up production to the point where Apple can reliably manufacture millions of them. Foxconn has been working on the AR lenses for about three years, the person familiar with the matter said. That timing coincides with Apple's 2018 purchase of Aconia Holographics,

Starting point is 00:03:33 a Colorado-based startup that utilized a liquid crystal on silicon display to project images inside its proprietary lenses. It isn't clear, however, if Apple is using Acconia's technology for these lenses. The lenses use a polarized system similar to the technology in 3D movie glasses, which create the illusion of depth using stereoscopic images, the person said. The technology is similar to that in other AR and VR devices already on the market from Microsoft, Magic Leap, and Facebook. Last year, Apple filed patents related to the technology while outside Apple developers uncovered test modes for the AR utilizing stereoscopic images inside its beta software, end quote. NBC Universal's late entrant to the subscription video streaming wars, known as Peacock, is set to launch on Wednesday, July 15th. And as part of the strategy to make up for the late start, the company was hoping to cut deals to have Peacock debut.

Starting point is 00:04:36 on Amazon and Roku platforms. But it looks like the negotiations for carriage deals on those platforms are coming down to the wire, quoting CNBC. Peacock continues to negotiate with both Amazon and Roku, said the people who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. One person familiar with the talks described the likelihood of reaching an agreement with either party by July 15 as less than 10%. The issues under negotiation present a window into what's important to media and technology companies as they build an infrastructure for the next generation of television. While programmers and pay TV distributors, cable telecom and satellite TV companies, have successfully negotiated carriage deals for decades,

Starting point is 00:05:15 subscription video services are striking their first deals with digital video aggregators, such as Apple, Amazon, and Roku. Both providers and content companies want to ensure their building viable business models, especially as Wall Street judge's overall corporate performance on the success of their streaming video initiatives. These deals which typically cover multiple years will be the backbone for streamers to reach profitability in the coming years. Roku and Amazon's Fire TV, the two largest connected TV platforms, make up about 70% of the connected TV market, according to e-marketer.

Starting point is 00:05:49 There are about 400 million internet-connected TV devices in the U.S., and about 80% of U.S. TV households have at least one internet-connected TV device, according to a June report from Leitman Research Group. Both Roku and Amazon have also failed to strike a pass. with AT&T's HBO Max, which launched May 27th. Peacock and HBO Max are wrestling with Amazon on issues regarding who controls user information. NBC Universal executives don't want Peacock to be included within Amazon channels. Amazon's store for video app purchasing, two of the people said,

Starting point is 00:06:22 while some streaming apps such as CBS All Access and Stars can be purchased through channels, others including Disney Plus, cannot. Amazon takes a percentage of revenue for each customer that subscribes through the store. Both AT&T and Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, are pushing back on Amazon because of its deal with Disney, which was struck in November, according to people familiar with the matter. Disney's deal with Amazon allowed Disney Plus, a new streaming service at the time, to appear on all Amazon Fire TV devices while keeping it out of the Amazon Channel's store. That decision forced customers to sign up and watch all programs directly through Disney Plus,

Starting point is 00:06:58 giving the entertainment company a direct one-to-one relationship with its customers. Like Disney, NBCU wants all users to sign up and watch through the Peacock application or website. That would give NBC Universal valuable credit card information and first-party user data, including information about the shows and movies that users watch. This data can then be used for targeted advertising, allowing Peacock to charge advertisers higher rates. The downside for NBC Universal is that channels distribution can help broaden reach and awareness for Peacock, end quote. There are also apparently ongoing negotiations. about sharing advertising inventory and advertising revenue.

Starting point is 00:07:36 But I mean, bargaining over carriage fees, ad inventory, subscriber data again, and I cannot stress this enough, we have blown up cable TV merely to reconstitute it in a Frankenstein form that has eliminated almost none of the troublesome issues that the old monster suffered from. Add this one to the list of surprising things to have benefited from the age of COVID. the PC industry. Both Gartner and IDC are seeing year-over-year growth in PC shipments, 2.8% growth seen by Gartner and 11.2% growth seen at IDC. But both analysts think this is very much being driven by people needing PCs for work-from-home demands, and thus the gains will likely be short-term, quoting Venture Beat. The PC market saw six years of quarterly PC

Starting point is 00:08:33 shipment declines, followed by mixed quarters in 2018 and 2019. Last year was more good than bad. Q1 was negative, while Q2, 3, and 4 were positive. The Windows 10 refresh cycle drove 2019 gains in the business market. Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 on January 14th. Similarly, 2020 was expected to see gains thanks to 5G and dual screen devices. Instead, we saw reduced supply due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, the world's largest supplier of PCs, leading to the sharpest decline in years. Now it looks like supply constraints have been addressed while a rise in work from home and distance learning is driving more demand from businesses and consumers alike, end quote.

Starting point is 00:09:14 Also this. While the deadline to upgrade away from Windows 7 is long gone, there are still hundreds of millions of computers that need Windows 10. Businesses that drag their feet before might want to reconsider, especially as Q2 2020 showed us that Q1 2020 was the odd one out. People are depending on PCs more, not less these days, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. The first one is not technology related at all, just something that I always find cool, so I couldn't help myself. I don't know why, but I have had this lifelong fantasy to either visit all of the most

Starting point is 00:09:56 remote islands in the world or even in my deepest, darkest fantasies, to actually just go off and live on one of them for the rest of my life. life. I'm talking about places like Easter Island, Svalbard, St. Helena, Auckland Island, Ascension Island, Prince Edward Islands, and of course, that other locality that is a positive metropolis compared to some that I just listed, the Falkland Islands. It turns out, according to this piece from the New Yorker, that in the nearly 40 years since the Falkland Islands war, the Falklands have gone through a bit of a boom. As the New Yorker puts it, once a an outpost of the British Empire of the islands have become a global crossroads. And in the season of

Starting point is 00:10:40 the coronavirus, the intimate communities may evolve yet again, quote, the Falkland Islands were now among the richest places on earth, with an income per capita comparable to those of Norway and Qatar. Despite its spending, the government had also put aside several years income for a rainy day. It had no debt at all. And meanwhile, the possibility had arisen of exponentially more money in the near future. Since the 1990s, or it was. Oil companies had been exploring the waters around the islands, and by the early 2010s, it had become clear that substantial oil deposits existed in the basins offshore. The islanders cautiously reminded themselves that drilling was not a certainty. It depended on oil prices and various

Starting point is 00:11:20 technical issues, but it seemed increasingly likely that this would happen and that the Falklands annual revenues could soon quadruple. On April 1st, a broadcaster on Falkland Islands radio announced that the government had struck gold, and everyone could claim free shares. in a mining venture. At that point, the news seemed so plausible that few people realized it was a joke, end quote. So imagine, because I can imagine it, if someday I was sending this podcast out to you every day from a little cottage on Stanley on the Falkland Islands, I would like that just fine. My life's ambition has always been to live in either the biggest cities in the world or the most remote islands in the world. Nothing in between, thank you very much. Also from the New Yorker, Anna Weiner looks at Ghost Kitchens, a business model that seemed marginal at best before the coronavirus pandemic, but which now looks like the future of restaurants at the very least.

Starting point is 00:12:18 In fact, depending on how you look at it, ghost kitchens and the like are either the hollowing out of our vibrant city life or a bold reimagining of how we use real estate in cities. Here's the lead of the piece. Last fall, walking down Mission Street in San Francisco, I noticed a new addition to an otherwise. unremarkable parking lot at the base of Bernal Heights Hill, a large white trailer about the size of three parking spaces plastered with a banner that read food pickup here. On one side was a list of restaurant brands with names and logos that seemed algorithmically generated, walk talk, burger bites, fork and ladle, umami, American eclectic burger, wings and things. The trailer was hooked up to a generator which was positioned behind two portable toilets. It occupied parking spots once reserved for

Starting point is 00:13:04 Maven, an hourly car rental startup, funded by General Motors and marketed to gig economy workers. GM shut down Maven in April. Through a small window cut into the side, I could see two men moving around what appeared to be a kitchen. The generator hummed, the air carried the comforting smell of fire food, the toilets were padlocked. One of the men came to the window and apologized. I couldn't order food directly, he told me. I would have to order through the apps.

Starting point is 00:13:29 The trailer, along with a few others in San Francisco, is operated by Reef Technology, a startup based in Miami. According to marketing materials, Reef creates thriving hubs for the on-demand economy by, quote, reimagining the common parking lot. By bringing in utilities like electricity, gas and water and setting up proprietary containers, the company hopes to turn parking lots into reconfigurable community hubs. Lots might be formatted to include mobile kitchens, beer gardens, retail pop-ups, vertical farms, auto body shops, medical services, rental stations for electric vehicles and so on. We have these pods, which arguably are not pretty, but they're functional.

Starting point is 00:14:07 They can support any kind of application. Ari O'Halvo, the CEO of Reef told me, if you want to put a grocery store in there, put a grocery store in there. Laundry, put laundry. Put laundry. O'Halo compares his company to Apple, just as the Apple store allows developers to create and sell iOS-based tools and services, so Reif provides infrastructure for parking-based businesses. Quote, Apple uses connectivity as a platform.

Starting point is 00:14:30 we use proximity as a platform. We allow third-party applications to stand on this proximity platform and get closer to consumers, he said, end quote. Next, one more behind the scenes on Quibi, though this is the most detailed and heavily sourced one yet. Quote, the amount of hype surrounding Quibi began to feel ominous, as if almost any level of success would feel like failure. Look at how much money Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus bring to the table in X Quibbibb. said, we're not raising $1.75 billion to start a pizza parlor in the West Village. We're doing it to try to compete for content with some of the world's biggest streamers. If they'd message that, they could have presented themselves as the small guys, taking on the big guys, but they

Starting point is 00:15:15 allowed expectations to sort to the point where people started thinking they were a Netflix competitor, end quote. Some of the industry skepticism seems to have an edge of personal antipathy. Katzenberg was a polarizing figure. He had been a relentless advocate for his projects and turned animators into stars, but some viewed him as a fame effer, Hollywood's version of a micromanager, and a Philistine. James B. Stewart in his book, Disney War, recounts an instance where Katzenberg ordered animators rendering the castle in beauty and the beast to, quote, fix the ceiling, make it French like Botticelli, end quote. And during his dreamworks years, some fellow moguls found Katzenberg's work ethic tiresome, quote, he's a time suck of

Starting point is 00:15:58 unbelievable proportions, says a longtime colleague. He has thrown some sharp elbows over the years, leading some of his most important relationships to rupture. He and Geffen no longer speak, for example. And when Comcast's Universal bought DreamWorks, it was on the condition that Katzenberg leave the company. Let's reiterate, a former friend says. Comcast chose to overpay for DreamWorks animation to not have him there, end quote. The Wall Street Journal has a much appreciated deep dive into the whole wire card mess, how it went from a tech star to bankruptcy seemingly overnight. Quote, because things fell apart so quickly, investigators are just now starting to piece together what happened. A central thesis being investigated by prosecutors, the company, and its auditor is

Starting point is 00:16:44 whether Wirecard used supposedly independent third-party partners who were meant to be processing its business in countries where it didn't have licenses to create fictional revenue streams that filled bank accounts that didn't exist, end quote. And let's end with a couple of random blog posts that I saw bubble up on Twitter or Hacker News this week. Product creator Nick Punt has an essay titled De-escalating Social Media, Designing Humility and Forgiveness into Social Media Products. I mean, hey, everyone always has ideas for how to fix Twitter, right? As we've discussed, with hints that Twitter might consider a subscription product soon. Everyone came out this week, out of the woodwork, again, with suggestions for what Twitter should.

Starting point is 00:17:28 do, even I did that. But Grock, this one, quote, take Twitter as an example environment. If we write something that turns out to be wrong and a pile on begins, we're going to be swimming upstream fighting our error. Our options are ignore replies and hopefully let it die out. Delete your tweet, posting another tweet saying I was wrong, or reply to your tweet posting, I was wrong. Social media engagement engines favor the drama of the mistake over the correction and reconciliation, which leads few people to see or remember anything other than the mistake. This seems like a perfect use case to design for, so I came up with a little design change I call the Twitter Mayaculpa. Twitter Mayaculpa is a way for a poster to flag their tweet as a mistake and de-escalate a situation

Starting point is 00:18:15 using the same action menu that deleting a post uses and the same visual design as flag tweets, end quote. Seems simple enough and potentially pretty powerful. And then finally over at the blog shape of code, there's this idea which is probably dead obvious once you stated out loud, but also worth stating. Algorithms have become commodities, quote, open source commoditized algorithms. And computers got a lot faster with memory measured in megabytes and then gigabytes. When it comes to algorithm implementation, developers are now spoiled for choice. Why waste time implementing the low-level stuff when there were plenty of problems waiting to be implemented. Algorithms are now like the bolts in a bridge. Very important,

Starting point is 00:19:02 but nobody talks about them. Today, developers talk about story points, features, business logic, etc. Given a well-defined problem, many are now likely to search for an existing package rather than write code from scratch. I certainly work this way, end quote. This is one of those discussions where the essay is short, but the conversation thread around it is what I found interesting. So I post the original essay and the Hacker News thread that led me to this essay in the first place. Both of them are in the show notes. That's all for this week. No weekend bonus episode this weekend, though.

Starting point is 00:19:45 I think I'd like to do another listener Colin episode next weekend. So start thinking about your questions for that now. I'll get more details together sometime next week, but we'll probably record on Saturday, July 18th, around 1 p.m. Eastern again. I'll post something on the show of subreddit once I've got all my ducks in a row. And before I let you go for the week, Hive Mind here finally is my mystery for you to solve. Okay, I post the show to two different feeds every day, right? Every day I post the episode to the ad-free feed first, and then about a half an hour

Starting point is 00:20:23 later I post to the main feed that most of you listen to. But here's the thing. When I do that, I have to write up the show notes each time, right? and put them in a little text field box on the podcast hosts. So I like to cut and paste between the two, right? I write up the show notes once on the online form for the ad-free feed. Then I like to copy and paste that over to the normal feed. Now, here's the mystery.

Starting point is 00:20:49 When I do this on my desktop, on my IMac, all of the links and bolding and italics and all that stuff transfer over from one text box to the other. It's literally cutting and pacing from one text. field in an online form to another, but when I do that same action on my laptop, the links don't transfer, the italics don't transfer. When I command V, it's just plain text on the other form field. So I have to go through and manually put in all the links and bolting and such. It's a pain in the butt. In other words, for some reason, the HTML just doesn't transfer on my clipboard on my laptop,

Starting point is 00:21:24 but it does on my IMAQ. Why is that? Can't figure out why this happens. I'm using the exact same web browsers with, I assume, the exact same settings, but also this will happen, or I guess not happen, no matter what browser I use, Brave, Chrome, Safari, Firefox. Again, on the desktop, the rich text transfers over when I paste, but on the laptop it simply doesn't, no matter what the browser, so I'm thinking it has some setting at the OS level. Look, this is either a dumb, simple solution, or it's a real mystery if you can figure out how I can get the rich text to transfer between text boxes on my laptop as well. You would literally save me 10 minutes in my workflow every single day. Flii, both machines are Max running Catalina. I put a post

Starting point is 00:22:10 in the show subreddit at R-slash ride home. If anyone can help me, link to that post at the bottom of the show notes. Help me, Hive Mind. You're my only hope. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/10 – Kuo: Apple Silicon Macs Coming THIS Year

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