Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/07 - Is Apple's Resolution Hardware Agnosticism?

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

Is Apple willing to sacrifice Apple TV for the greater subscription good, is Google Assistant is coming to feature phones, what is the use-case for a tv you can roll up into a box, and plenty more like that because it’s time to let the CES headlines rain over you. Sponsors: go.bitrise.io/ride metalab.co Stories from: @henrytcasey, @AshleyRReports Tweets:  @geoffreyfowler Links: Apple is putting iTunes on Samsung TVs (The Verge) Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices, and feature phones are next (The Verge) Everything you may have missed from Nvidia's CES keynote (Techspot) HP Launches First-Ever AMD Chromebook (LaptopMag) Withings undercuts Apple Watch, debuts $129 ECG monitoring smartwatch (ArsTechnica) LG’s groundbreaking roll-up TV is going on sale this year (The Verge) Keeping up with Netflix originals is basically a part-time job now (QZ) 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 from Monday, January 7th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is Apple willing to sacrifice Apple TV for the greater subscription good?

Is Google Assistant coming to feature phones? What is the use case for a TV you can roll up into a box? And plenty more questions like that because it's time to let the CES headlines rain over you. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, it's CES time. so buckle in because the best we can do this week is just ride the lightning and try to keep abreast of the most interesting headlines and keep our heads above the flood, as it were.

The first headline, though, would be a major headline any other day of the week or week of the year. Samsung and Apple have agreed to play nice, at least when it comes to televisions. Now, Apple's fraught relationship with Samsung is not quite as bitter as Apple's war with Qualcomm in the sense that Apple and Samsung have always had some sort of relationship

as Samsung has always been a major Apple supplier, though there was some major litigation back in the day that was resolved last year. So given that, this is super interesting. Samsung's 2018 and 2019 TV models will be able to access iTunes content

directly via a dedicated iTunes app on the TVs. and the TVs will support Apple's Airplay 2 wireless streaming standard. So this essentially means if you get the latest Samsung TV, you don't need an actual Apple TV hockey puck in order to stream your Apple content. Quoting The Verge, the iTunes movies and TV shows app,

which will be available in 100 countries on both Samsung's 2019 TVs as well as its 2018 models after a firmware update, marks the first time Apple has a little bit of, allowed third-party devices to access its video library outside of a Windows PC. It could also be a prelude to a video streaming service that Apple is currently rumored to be working on, which is tellingly also reported to be coming to 100 countries. Apple tells the verge that Samsung's smart TV ad tracking features cannot track viewing usage within the iTunes movies and TV shows app,

in another example of Apple's focus on privacy, end quote. So this is soups interesting for several reasons. Let's start with the high-level view. Remember last week's revenue estimate restatement by Apple? Remember how much Apple wants you to know about how it's growing its services business by leaps and bounds. Remember that Apple streaming video service that we're expecting, not to mention their recent success with Apple Music. And remember how we said it felt like hell freezing over when Apple brought Apple music to the Amazon Echo. So this is us seeing Apple's changing strategy playing out in real time,

as Jeffrey Flower at the Washington Post tweeted, This is Apple saying services are more important than Apple TV hardware sales. Apple changing its ways was one of the themes I called out in my 2019 tech predictions. Make sense for Apple. Becoming a services business requires getting access in more places. Carolina Milanese concurred tweeting, considering Samsung's TV market share, this makes perfect sense for Apple. I bet many iPhone users have a Samsung TV.

And Nilai Patel was typically blunt, tweeting, You really can't read this as anything but a recognition that the Apple TV doesn't sell and Apple needs more service scale, end quote. Somewhere Gene Munster is crying himself to sleep under a pile of his previously published predictions that Apple would inevitably do a real TV. one day. On a similar tip, Vizio has announced that it is adding support for AirPlay2 and HomeKit to its smartcast-enabled TVs, and those TVs can now be controlled using Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. And LG is bringing Airplay 2 support to its 2019 TVs and HomeKit support and

took the time to take a subtle dig at Samsung by noting that LG sets support Dolby Vision and Atmos, which Samsung sets don't got, apparently. Google apparently has a massive presence at CES this year. I'm told that their booth is three times larger than last year, and there's even Google-branded monorails running around. And so, of course, Google has some news to announce as well. The company says it expects that by the end of this month, Google Assistant will be on 1 billion devices globally, up from just 500 million as of May of 2018. And while they were mum on Gao global active users, Google did claim that users of Assistant grew by 4x year over year. Google is no doubt enjoying that that means Google Assistant has about 900 million more users

than Alexa does. But of course, you get to that number by assuming most users. of Google Assistant are on Android phones. Guess what, however, Google has an interesting strategy to grow even those numbers even more. Google Assistant could soon be coming to feature phones. Here's what Manuel Bronstein, the company's vice president of Google Assistant, told Vlad Savov at the Verge,

quote, there are large, large numbers of feature phones in the market today, hundreds of millions. But if you think about writing, reading, and typing on those feature phones, it's not that simple. And the voice first integration is becoming increasingly important in those markets, and we're beginning to see traction there. We're going to start talking more about that at Mobile World Congress, but definitely there's a massive opportunity for voice interaction and assistive technology in those markets as well, end quote. At its CES keynote, Nvidia unveiled its RTX 2060 desktop graphics card available for $349 beginning January 15th,

that boasts 52 trillion tensor flops, 6 gigabytes of G6 memory, 5 gig arrays per second, and is capable of ray tracing. Also, the RTX20 series is coming to laptops, 40 different laptops beginning January 29th, with 17 of those using MaxQ designs. Nvidia also announced that it was enabling G-Sync on any adaptive sync monitors, Quoting from TechSpot, gamers have had a love-hate relationship with G-Sync

since it's launched five years ago. Just like AMD's FreeSink, it smooths out gameplay by removing screen tearing and shuttering. But unlike FreeSink, it adds an additional couple hundred dollars to the monitor's cost. With Nvidia dominating the high-end GPU market, however, gamers have been forced to pay the price. Until now, that is.

Today, Nvidia has announced that they've secretly tested over 400 monitors with adaptive sync and variable refresh rate technologies, and they found 12 that qualify to be G-Sync certified. Amusingly, quite a few of these are actually cheaper free-sync variants of G-Sync panels released by the same manufacturer. They say they've still got 150 monitors to go, and they'll check any new ones released, end quote. HP has announced Chromebook 14, its first AMD-based Chromebook with a 14-inch screen,

AMD A4 or A6 CPUs, integrated radion R4 or R5 GPUs, and 4 gigabytes of RAM, starting at just $269. Quoting Henry T. Casey at Laptop Magazine, while those graphics performance boosts remain to be seen, the average Chromebook user would hopefully see the benefits in. an Android app emulation via the Google Play Store. Also, HP's rating this Chromebook for up to nine hours and 15 minutes of battery life, which is solid if it lives up to the hype. We look forward to using the laptop mag battery test to see how well that checks out, end quote. Withings has unveiled a $129 move ECG smartwatch,

complete with activity and sleep tracking, but also with an ECG monitor that is awaiting at. FDA clearance. But the Withing's watch doesn't look like your typical smart watch. It's a smart watch is as smartwatch does sort of situation. Quoting from Ars Technica, like Withings wearables of yesteryear, the move ECG has an analog face,

but includes most of the smart technology inside that you'd expect from a modern wearable. The kickers are its three electrodes that measure electrocardiograms, two of which are embedded into the body of the watch, the third sits in the watch's bezel. To take a reading, users need to touch both sides of the bezel at the same time while wearing the watch and wait about 30 seconds for it to take a measurement. The process sounds nearly identical to that of the Apple Watch Series 4, which has one circular electrode on its underside and one smaller electrode on its digital crown. The Move ECG sends that

data to Withing's HealthMate mobile app so you can see if your heartbeat was normal or if any signs of atrial fibrillation were detected. Data accumulated over time can be seen in larger charts and graphs in the app and that data can be exported so users can easily share it with their doctors, end quote. The Move ECG smartwatch will reportedly be available in Q2 of 2019. But no, let's come back to TVs. The tech news ecosystem tends to ignore TV tech for most of the year. CES is really where the TVs get their moment in the sun. So let's look at some more new TV stuff. We know that flexible displays are going to be a thing this year

across all sorts of devices, including smartphones, reportedly. But how about I tell you about a rollable TV set? The signature OLED TVR comes from LG, and it is, in fact, a 65-inch 4K OLED TV, that sports 100-watt-Dobie Atmos. But the selling point here is that the TV sits in a little box or drawer or whatever. It sort of looks like a TV stand or entertainment center. When you want to watch the TV, the screen slides up into place coming out of the box.

When you don't want to watch TV, hit a button, and the screen rolls itself up and goes back into its box. What exactly is the point of this, you might ask? Well, some people have never been comfortable. about the fact that a whole side of your room is devoted to a giant screen full stop, but also devoted to a giant screen that is not even in use a lot of the time. This is becoming more and more of a problem the bigger TVs get. So this is an aesthetic solution for those who don't want a screen hogging space in your living room.

When the TV is not needed, it hides itself discreetly and the balance returns to your living space. In the link to this story in the show notes, you can see videos of this rollable TV in action. Takes about 10 seconds to deploy or stow away, conversely. There's also the option to leave about one-fourth of the display poking its head up outside of its box for the purpose of, I don't know, showing news headlines or now-playing display when you're playing music, that sort of thing. LG even includes a crackling fireplace or soothing rain sounds for, ambience. And guess what? This is also one of those TVs that will be getting Alexa and Apple Airplay 2 support. Quoting Chris Welch from the Verge. LG insists that customers don't lose or sacrifice

anything in terms of picture quality by picking a rollable display over one of the rigid standard OLED sets. This is supposed to be up there with the company's very best when it comes to brightness, contrast and features the same second-generation alpha-9 processing chip as LG's other 2019 TVs. You get all of the OLED hallmarks like perfect blacks, great viewing angles, and a wide mix of vivid HDR color. But we'll have to wait for a direct comparison to see if there are any slight performance trade-offs, end quote. Welch points out that this should not come cheap. LG's previous wallpaper OLED TV started at $8,000, so this should likely be more than that, but we'll find out for sure when this baby goes on sale in March.

Finally today, what are you going to watch on that roll-up TV? Netflix, of course, because there's oh, so very much Netflix to watch. And now we know exactly how much, thanks to Quartz, who did the legwork and number crunching to reveal that if you watched all 3, 345 original series, movies, and other streaming offerings Netflix produced in 2018, you'd have to sit down to consume 90,000 minutes or 1,500 hours of content. Just to get through all of this, you'd need to watch more than four hours every day of the year, or if you were going to do it in one sitting, it would take you nine consecutive weeks of continuous viewing,

giving new meaning to the term binge watching. The vast majority of Netflix's content last year, broken down by minute, came from original serieses, your houses of cards, your fuller houses, your things stranger. Serieses accounted for 60% of total minutes produced by Netflix last year, but interestingly, coming in in second place at 11% was the documentary category. films only came in at 10%. Documentaries clocked in at 10,100 minutes of original programming,

while films only 8,500 minutes. And even though it seemed like everyone and your mother got a stand-up comedy special last year, stand-up comedy only clocked in at 3,600 minutes or 3%. As Quartz notes, Netflix content honcho Ted Serendos said Netflix's goal for 2018 was 1,000 different original content titles. No word on their official 2019 New Year's resolution, at least not yet. You know those auto replies that Gmail suggests for you now when you reply to any email? I got an email from someone over the weekend that started out,

Super! Sounds awesome! And then ended. That was it. Problem was, I know this person very well. And first of all, they would never use the word super, pretty much ever. And Awesome is basically an adjective too far for this person as well. They're, let's just say, not quite that unequivocally positively emotive. But also, crucially, emails from this person are never less than 700 words long.

When this guy has something to say, he has plenty to say. So I knew, right? he used one of those auto-generated responses from Gmail. And all the sudden, I was struck with terror. Might I also be outed when I use the auto replies? Will someone realize I just clicked on one of the suggestions, and will I be judged if I do so? Will people be like,

Brian didn't even read my email? I bet he's just blazing through his inbox doing email triage. I wonder if people will start to get self-conscious about using these canned responses. for that very reason, for fear of being outed, of not seeming like you cared enough to give a personal response. I actually wonder if Google is already seeing this behavior in the wild inaction, and I wonder actually if they've already considered this

and thought about ways to combat it. I mean, the other fear is that people will just use these responses to sign off when they finished a big, long missive and just can't really think of anything else intelligent to say. Anyway, super sounds awesome. Talk to you tomorrow.