Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, 7/13 - A Big-Boy Photoshop for iPads

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

Full Photoshop is coming to iPads, PC sales are growing again, what now for the AT&T/Time Warner merger, what does an unlimited data plan really mean, and the weekend longreads suggestions. Stories from: @imkialikethecar, @ballmatthew Tweets: @renato_mariotti Links:Top of the Morning (Axios)AT&T’s no-good week shows why it may regret its Google envy (Fast Company)Uber begins monitoring U.S. driver background checks continuously (Axios)Unlimited data plans are a mess: here’s how to pick the best one (The Verge) Weekend Longreads:Hell for Elon Musk Is a Midsize Sedan (Bloomberg Businessweek)How Twitter Became Home to the Teen Status Update (The Atlantic)Why Some of Instagram's Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts (The Atlantic)GEORGE HOTZ IS ON A HACKER CRUSADE AGAINST THE ‘SCAM’ OF SELF-DRIVING CARS (The Verge)THE ONLY GOOD ONLINE FANDOM LEFT IS DUNE (The Outline)Netflix Isn’t Being Reckless, It’s Just Playing a Game No One Else Dares (Netflix Misunderstandings, Pt. 3) (Matthew Ball/Redef) 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 ride home for Friday, July 13th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, full Photoshop is coming to iPads.

PC sales are actually growing again. What now for the AT&T Time Warner merger? What does an unlimited data plan really mean? And the weekend Longreads suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The wrap has long been that iPads are great for casual use. but if you really need to get work done, they're not your go-to machine.

Well, another nail in that coffin, as Mark German is reporting that Adobe is planning to unveil a full version of Photoshop for the iPad at its annual Max Creative Conference in October. Again, full version, not a neutered mobile version. If all goes well, the plan is for the app to be available

sometime next year. Adobe's chief product officer of Creative Cloud Scott Belski told Bloomberg in an interview, quote, My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible. There's a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era, end quote. And of course, that's exactly the point.

From Adobe's perspective, this is yet another step in their nearly decade-long march to transform their entire business model into a new business model into software as a service. No more selling software in shrink wrap boxes. Instead, you pay one recurring subscription and get your favorite Adobe apps on any device you want to use. But this is also part of Adobe's efforts to get mainstream users hooked on their productivity and creativity apps.

Professionals, of course, have long relied on Adobe's tools for high-end photo editing and illustration and the like, but Adobe wants to hook more casual creators as well. So moving to a user-friendly, platform like tablets makes sense in that context. Of course, Adobe has also had to bite its time to wait for the technology to catch up to its ambitions, but modern tablets, especially like the iPad pros, are now finally powerful and robust enough to handle a meaty program like Photoshop. Steve Jobs once predicted that tablets would someday replace, especially laptops, as the primary

computing device for some people. And certainly getting Photoshop. on an iPad does nothing to throw cold water on that prediction. But the PC's not dead yet, and in fact, according to research firms Gartner and IDC, PC sales are actually growing for the first time in six years. IDC says that in the second quarter of 2018, PC shipments increased 2.7%. Gartner puts the number at 1.4%, but that's still growth. It should be noted that IDC includes Chromebooks in their accounting, but excludes detachable tablets like Surface Pros.

Conversely, Gartner actually includes Windows-based tablet PCs but excludes Chromebooks. So it's sort of a mixed bag in terms of getting a firm definitive number. But that doesn't really matter because the headline number is the one that matters, and that indicates that the PC market has recorded its first year-over-year growth since the first quarter of 2012. Both research firms credit business buyers for the uptick in sales. Jay Cho, research manager at IDC, said, quote, although traditional PCs may not be the default device for many usage scenarios,

the market continues to show pockets of resiliency as PC usage experience evolves and improves. Even certain types of desktops are seeing growth amid a business-driven refresh cycle. So this happened late in the day yesterday, too late for me to include it in yesterday's show, but in an unusual move, the Justice Department is appealing the Time Warner AT&T merger, which has already closed. The appeal won't change anything while it takes place because AT&T is still committed to moving forward,

but it does introduce the possibility that AT&T might have to someday unwind a merger that will have already been integrated. I've been trying to get a sense of how unusual this is to appeal a merger that has already been consummated, And the best summation I've seen comes from Dan Premack at Axios. It is possible, actually, to unwind a closed deal. One merger was even undone seven years after it happened. Premack seems to think that it's unlikely that this particular deal will be overturned in the end, but several people find it curious that the Justice Department is so hung up on this one. Yes, this is a vertical merger.

AT&T owns the pipes already and is looking to a question. the content to send over those pipes. But there was another recent high-profile vertical merger that seems to be going ahead no problem, CBS and Aetna. So there are some people who suspect that this could all come down to politics. Former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti tweeted, quote, the Trump administration's decision to appeal the judge's approval of the AT&T time-winter merger appears politically motivated. The judge's 172, page opinion approving the merger was extremely detailed and well-reasoned, and DOJ's initial challenge was unusual and dubious, end quote.

Dan Premack writes, quote, why is DOJ appealing? I've not heard a compelling answer on this. Some conspiracy theories are that it's to appease the White House and or Rupert Murdoch, i.e. put the screws to Comcast. But it strains at least a bit of credulity to think DOJ rank and file. i.e. those who do the actual work, would go along with that, particularly because a negative appeals court ruling may weaken DOJ's hand in other vertical merger oppositions. Note, it is apparently letting CVS Aetna go through, end quote. As David Litsky asks in Fast Company, quote, at what point in the last five days did AT&T have a moment of creeping doubt that this whole desire to be a player in Hollywood may not be worth the headaches, end quote.

There was, of course, that unbelievably tone-deaf and much mocked talk by Warner Media Head, John Stanky, that everyone was talking about earlier this week because it sure as heck sounded like AT&T was bound and determined to ruin everything that is good about HBO, just because of Netflix envy. And then now there's this DOJ vendetta, which even if AT&T prevails ultimately could certainly slow down its attempts to become a relevant media player. Although, on the bright side, Litsky writes, it likely means no more consumer price hikes for the foreseeable future. Uber is now monitoring its army of drivers with real-time criminal background checks. For a while now, Uber has only run background checks on drivers periodically.

But according to Axios, Uber has partnered with background checkers, Checker, and Apriis, two on a regular basis, discover if drivers have racked up new criminal offender or violations since the last time Uber checked. Uber apparently began testing this new system earlier this month, deploying it to a, quote, meaningful percentage of its U.S. drivers. So far, 25 drivers have been removed from Uber's service due to new issues being found during the checks. So obviously, this is good news for customer safety, of course,

but also it's potentially good news for drivers because it means that since Uber will now be monitoring these things on a regular basis. If drivers have been blocked from driving for Uber due to previous background checks, they can now potentially reapply to Uber once their issues have been resolved, and Uber will now know that because they'll be checking this sort of thing continually. Sprint recently made changes to its so-called unlimited data plans, and everyone is dragging the company for it.

There are now two new plans with the title Unlimited, Unlimited Plus, and Unlimited Data, which, as Gizmodo, notes engage in some, quote, verbal gymnastics to justify their different limitations while still clinging to the title unlimited. The Verge says Sprint realized that its unlimited plans were quote, never going to be unlimited anyway and it might as well run with it, end quote. According to the Verge, the new unlimited basic plan is a worse version of the existing $60 a month unlimited freedom plan, cutting down LTE hotspot data allowances and throttling video to 480p for example. The other plan, Unlimited Plus, is now $10 a month more, but that only gets you close to what

the Unlimited Freedom Plan used to be for $10 a month more. The Verge notes that after the first wave of Unlimited Data Plan euphoria broke out, thanks to T-Mobile a few years ago, all of the major U.S. carriers have basically been muddying the water in terms of what Unlimited really actually means. In an article I'll link to in the show notes, they compared in air quotes unlimited plans to try to determine which carrier offers the best deal. Their conclusion, Verizon is the most expensive, but they probably still have the best network, so that's probably the best plan. If T-Mobile and Sprint get good coverage in your area, then maybe go with them because they are the cheapest. But the Verge concluded, quote, if you're looking to support whichever carrier is

best upholding net neutrality? Well, among the big four, none of them are. Restricting video quality, limiting hotspot usage to some plans, zero rating, and other asterix are clear evidence of that. Unlimited data is still technically unlimited, but somehow carriers have turned their services into a confusing mess. And it'll probably only get worse if T-Mobile and Sprint join up, end quote. Which is why some of us are still clinging on for dear life to those original grandfather in lifetime unlimited data plans that AT&T offered with the earliest iPhones. Time for your weekend long-read suggestions. First up, if you've been following the whole Tesla Model 3 production crunch story,

there's really no better long-read summation of that story than the cover story in this week's Bloomberg Business Week. There's a feature titled, Hell for Elon Musk is a mid-sized sedan. Read at least until you hit the Mad Men-esque anecdote about the forklift incident. If you remember the lawnmower scene in Mad Men, you'll get that reference. Next, you've probably heard of Black Twitter, Stan Twitter, Media Twitter, Weird Twitter. But have you heard of local Twitter?

As the Atlantic describes it, it's probably not what you think. The typical local Twitter user is a teen who is in their own bubble of simple life pleasures and desires. doesn't live their entire life online and uses Twitter to connect to their real-life friends like they used to do on Facebook, explains Raqweza, a 22-year-old in New York, end quote. On a related social media note, why are some of Instagram's biggest follows locking down their accounts? Again, a piece from the Atlantic, quote, people go private because they get more followers when a follower sends a post to their friends, and then that person has to follow the, account just in order to see. It's that simple, says Jack Wagner, a Los Angeles-based director who has run

several meme accounts. Quote, it's just a weird technique. Somebody noticed one day and now lots of people do it, end quote. The verge has a profile of George Holtz, a famous hacker who has cobbled together a DIY system using

smartphones that he claims could potentially turn any car into a level four autonomous vehicle. Quote, we're half Halfway to a consumer product, Holtz told the verges Andrew J. Hawkins. The hardware is available for sale in our shop, and the software will all be on our GitHub by the time this article goes live. Every line of code you see running in this car is open source. Hawkins took a test drive with Holtz, so check the piece to see how close to reality he thinks this actually is.

The outline has a great piece up making the case that Dune Fandom is the only good sci-fi. fandom left in the modern world. This is partially because, even despite the recent critical reassessment of the David Lynch movie, Dune has never had a tent pole filmed version that made such a serious enough cultural impact that it could be claimed by an entire generation. And Dune is really just freaking weird. And oddly enough, that has kind of helped keep it neutral. Herbert's plot is so weird, so all over the place, you can basically engage.

with the text, and no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you can still feel like it's speaking to you in terms of how you see the world. But most importantly, as Sean T. Collins writes, quote, Dune is not a corporate cash cow, and being a fan doesn't carry with it that icky feeling you're doing an unpaid PR internship for Disney or AT&T Time Warner, end quote. In other words, a Duncan Idaho meme is somehow still pure in a way, even if far more people understand the cultural references inherent in a red wedding joke. Finally, you might be tired of me harping on this, but I can't resist. For the last long read, I want to share with you some absolutely brilliant analysis of Netflix from Matthew Ball.

Who's Matthew Ball? He's the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios. So he really knows what he's talking about. Why structurally is traditional media finding it so difficult to compete with Netflix? Because of three key advantages, Ball identifies. First, there's a natural flywheel effect that Netflix is taking advantage of. The more subscribers it gets, the more it can spend to create new content, which in turn drives new subscribers, which in turn pays for new content, which in turn, well, you get the picture.

In comparison, traditional broadcasters have always had a very real content ceiling. There's only so many hours in a day. You can only air so many shows in your schedule, so if you may be. make a new one, you inherently need to replace one. Netflix doesn't have that constraint. Quote, any series that can meet the company's target cost per hour watched contributes to its penetration and engagement, as do those that don't, albeit less efficiently, end quote. Second, any dominant, modern video player, as Netflix is becoming, effectively crowds out all of its competitors. Again, there's only so many hours in a day, only so much free time that you have,

to give over to entertainment. Once you're locked into a streaming service and you're familiar with its menu system and you have a viewing history and a recommendation algorithm you've invested in to tune itself to your taste, you're very much less likely to jump ship. Thus, quote,

Netflix's ever-increasing spend and output continues to get less risky, not more, and further insulates the company from competitive pressures, end quote. In other words, far from being reckless, Netflix's willingness to pour money into new content over and over again could actually eventually create a scenario where it has so much content people want, it would look cost-effective to consumers even at a higher subscription price.

Quote, audiences would still have a few focused carve-outs, such as HBO, ESPN, or Disney, but rather than enlisting for Discovery plus AMC, plus ABC, plus Nickelodeon, plus Showtime, etc., the average household would just need Netflix. Not only does the company benefit from a virtuous cycle in pursuit of this goal, this would save the average household hundreds of dollars per year, even if Netflix doubled or tripled its monthly fee, end quote. In other words, the beauty part of Netflix's strategy is that it has the ability to substantially raise prices

someday in the future absolutely baked into the cake. After all, it's looking to replace your cable subscription, right? which is $80 to $100 monthly in the U.S. on average, though for a lot of us, $200. So as long as Netflix continues to give you more, it knows that it can eventually ask you to pay more because it would still be less than cable. Conversely, cable's not going to reduce prices anytime soon. Finally, the third advantage is simple scale. In the cable TV era, you were hitting it out of the park if you got your channel distributed to, say,

100 million households like ESPN did. But Netflix is targeting the entire $450 billion global TV industry. As Ball notes, if Netflix reaches, say, 250 million global subscribers in coming years, something that certainly seems feasible, it would achieve greater media dominance and scale than any media company has ever known

in the history of the world. But what if it got to, I don't know, 400 million households someday or more? Ball's overarching point is that while some Netflix bears and its competitors in Hollywood think Netflix is being reckless in spending, spending, spending, and even taking on enormous debt in order to finance production, in his opinion, the company is actually behaving manifestly rationally. Quote, understanding this mentality is critical to understanding what Netflix does and why. It isn't fighting to win a time slot, an overnight rating, or an advertiser. It's after every minute of leisure time available. an economic term that refers to all time not spent working.

The magnitude of this ambition is without comparison in media, and it follows that the spend and investment losses required to realize this ambition would be similarly shocking. What's more, it means the company is ultimately in competition with content platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, each of which primarily provides content that is free to both the platform and its users. This is why the company, company's biggest question is what will inevitably come next and why the answer is unlikely

to be just linear pre-recorded video. If Netflix someday has 250 to 400 million subscriptions with an average of three user profiles per subscription, say, each spending at least three hours a day on the service and thus accessing it multiple times per day, the company will have built a paid consumer platform with greater engagement than even Facebook, end quote. Again, as we've been saying, one app for anything. One app for transportation, one app to buy things, one app to talk to friends, one app for entertainment. As Ball says, quote, Netflix doesn't want to be a leader in video or even the leader in video.

It wants to monopolize the consumption of video to become TV, end quote. I know I say this all the time, but I cannot recommend reading this essay more highly. Link is, of course, in the show notes. It's Friday the 13th, everybody. But did you also know that today is also the 17th anniversary of the premiere of the movie Legally Blonde? Why do I have these two very important factoids top of mind? Because sometimes when you put new apps on your phone, you forget to actually go in and granularly tweak the settings for notification.

I was testing out a couple new headline discovery apps this morning, and as you can see, they don't always surface the most useful headlines, at least for me anyway. Anyway, I've been your host, as always, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC, and enjoy your weekend.