Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/18 - Ming-Chi Kuo: Here's Apple's Entire 2019 Lineup

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Parliament calls Facebook a “digital gangster,” Australia’s Parliament was hacked, a full year of Apple lineup rumors, and since it’s a holiday here in the US, a mini longread segment.  Sponsors: The Castro Podcast App Flatironschool.com/techmeme Links: UK parliament calls for antitrust, data abuse probe of Facebook (TechCrunch) Australia's major political parties hacked in 'sophisticated' attack ahead of election (The Sydney Morning Herald) Kuo: 16-inch MacBook Pro, 31-inch 6K display, iPhones w/ upgraded Face ID & bilateral wireless charging coming in 2019 (9to5Mac) Etsy sellers say their bank accounts were emptied in major billing snafu (BoingBoing) Elroy Air raises $9.2 million for delivery drones that can carry up to 500 pounds (VentureBeat) Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder (ArsTechnica) 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 Monday, February 18th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Parliament calls Facebook a digital gangster.

Australia's Parliament was hacked. A full year of Apple lineup rumors. And since it's a holiday here in the U.S., a mini long reads segment. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Cambridge Analytica scandal actually broke in Britain, if you'll recall, as that was where Cambridge Analytica was based. So the UK Parliament has been following up on investigations around that scandal, around fake news and disinformation campaigns on social media,

especially on Facebook. The final report from the Parliamentary Committee investigating these issues, the Information Commissioner's Office, that final report came out today and the results are scathing. The report literally calls Facebook a, quote, digital gangster, end quote. Quoting from the report, companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like digital gangsters in the online world,

considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law, end quote. Some more choice quotes from various sections of the report, not in chronological order, by the way, quote, Facebook's handling of personal data and its use for political campaigns are prime and legitimate areas for inspection by regulators, and it should not be able to evade all editorial responsibility for the content shared by its users across its platforms. And, quote, social media companies cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a platform and maintain that they have no responsibility themselves in regulating the content of their sites. And, quote, our interim report recommended that clear legal liabilities should be established for

tech companies to act against harmful or illegal content on their sites. There is now an urgent need to establish independent regulation. and quote, the big tech companies must not be allowed to expand exponentially without constraint or proper regulatory oversight, end quote. So that last bit is a shot across the bow of all tech companies. But back to Facebook specifically, I'm quoting from TechCrunch's analysis of the report here. Quote, another interesting tidbit from the report is confirmation that the ICO has shared the names of three senior managers at Facebook, who knew about the Cambridge Analytica data breach. prior to the first press report in December 2015, which is the date Facebook has repeatedly told the committee was when it first learnt of the breach, contradicting what the ICO found via its own investigations.

The committee's report does not disclose the names of the three senior managers, saying the ICO has asked the names to remain confidential. We've reached out to the ICO to ask why it is not making this information public, and implies the execs did not relay the information to Zuckerberg. end quote. But I'm going to end by going back to just quoting from the report itself. Far from Facebook acting against sketchy or abusive apps, of which action it has produced no evidence at all, it in fact worked with such apps as an intrinsic part of its business model. This is just one example of the bad faith, which we believe justifies governments holding a business such as Facebook at arm's length. It seems clear to us that Facebook acts only when serious breaches become public. This is what happened in 2015 and 2018.

We consider that data transfer for value is Facebook's business model and that Mark Zuckerberg's statement that, quote, we've never sold anyone's data, end quote, is simply untrue, end quote. Of course, all of that Michigas began with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had implications of foreign governments manipulating public opinion around elections. So this is unfortunately timely. Australia's prime minister told, the country's parliament today that Australia's parliament and its three largest political parties

have all been hacked by a, quote, sophisticated state actor, end quote. Australia has big elections coming in May, apparently, quoting the Sydney Morning Herald. Sources are describing the level of sophistication as unprecedented, but are unable to say yet which foreign government is behind the attack. The attacks are understood to carry the digital fingerprints of China, though authorities are concerned that another state could be replicating the hallmarks of Chinese intelligence to deflect blame towards them. Mr. Morrison told Parliament on Monday that while investigating the parliamentary hack, cybersecurity authorities, quote, also became aware that the networks of some political parties, liberal, labor, and nationals have also been affected, end quote. Security agencies, quote, acted decisively to confront it, Mr. Morrison said.

Our cyber experts believe that a sophisticated state actor is responsible for this malicious activity, end quote. The Mr. Morrison of those quotes is Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. And the Sydney Morning Herald notes that it is believed that only four states are capable of hacking activities at the level observed by the Australians, listing those nations as Russia, China, the United States, and Israel. In the universe of Apple Rumors, people tend to trust our friend Mark German's scoops, of course, but also they tend to trust the predictive analysis of Ming Chi Kuo simply because when he says Apple is going to do a thing, the majority of the time he ends up being right.

He's the one who accurately predicted the screen sizes of last year's iPhones and the fact that there were going to be three different models. Well, Kuo is out with a grab bag of predictions for Apple's entire gadget lineup for the entire year. So if you're an Apple fan, here's what your 2019 is probably going to look like, according to Quo. Three iPhones again this year, same screen sizes. The low end 10R follow-up is going to stick to that cheaper LCD screen rather than jump to OLED. Frosted glass casing might be coming to some iPhones, similar to what we've seen with the Pixel 3s. The iPhones will be sticking with lightning connectors for now, no jump to USBC,

but Quo says they'll be getting bilateral wireless charging. Of course, you can already charge your phone wirelessly, but only in one direction. Now you could potentially use your phone to wirelessly charge other things as well. Like, I don't know, AirPods. Quo says the updated AirPods will ship in the first half of this year, as will the mythical air power charging mat also coming, though maybe not in the first half of this year, updates to the iPod Touch and iPad Mini,

and the expected upgrades to the existing iPads, Quo says, will see them get 10.2-inch screens, creaking them ever closer to iPad Pro size, although possibly that sort of screen size can be achieved with a thinning of bezels. And Quo had some interesting predictions on the Mac side as well, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Perhaps most notable are Quo's claims about the Mac lineup.

According to the analyst, Apple will release a new MacBook Pro between 16 inches and 16.5 inches with an all-new design. Further, Quo says Apple will return to the display market with a 31.6-inch 6K-3K monitor. This display is said to feature a mini-LED-like backlight design, giving it, quote, outstanding picture quality. end quote. Additionally, Quo adds that Apple will release a new Mac Pro with, quote, easy to upgrade components in 2019. He also says the 13-inch MacBook Pro may add 32 gigabytes as a RAM option.

Currently, the 13-inch MacBook Pro maxes out at 16 gigabytes of RAM, while the 15-inch does support 32 gigabytes. Apple had previously teased that it would release a modular Mac Pro in 2019, and today's Quo report seemingly indicates that Apple is still on schedule to do just that. Apple also teased its return to the professional display market alongside that Mac Pro launch, end quote. On Friday, Etsy accidentally charged a number of seller accounts for hundreds, even thousands of dollars. So, yeah, that really put a crimp in a lot of Etsy sellers' budgets

over the long bank holiday here in the U.S. this weekend. If you're a seller on Etsy, you have to keep a business. bank account on file in order to run an Etsy storefront. Well, suddenly, a bunch of those seller bank accounts saw mysterious withdrawals. The amounts tended to vary, and a lot of the withdrawals were automatically blocked by some people's banks and credit cards, but also some went through, which led to headaches, including overdraft fees, canceled credit cards, frozen accounts, not to mention folks not having enough money for the holiday weekend, and no way to rectify matters until Tuesday. Here is the statement from Etsy on the matter.

Quote, we're aware of a bill payment error affecting a small group of sellers, which resulted in some cards being incorrectly charged. We don't expect this error to impact additional sellers going forward. For affected sellers, we're very sorry for the trouble and concern this may have caused, and we are currently working to make things right. We'll update the impacted sellers directly as we have more information, end quote. So, okay, Etsy screwed up, but it's going to fix this, right? Just poor timing because of the long bank holiday weekend. However, they have been trying to fix it already, and apparently there's a problem with that, quoting from Boing Boing. Instead of canceling the transactions directly with the seller's banks or credit card companies, Etsy chose to refund the money to the shop owner's payment accounts.

This is a problem for multiple reasons, because, this happened on a Friday, and because Monday is a national holiday, the earliest the sellers will have access to their money is on Tuesday. They will have to re-deposit that money into their checking accounts or pay their credit card bill. That still leaves some sellers with overdraft and over-limit fees. Then there's a potential tax issue. Money placed in shop owners' payment accounts is considered taxable income and is reported to the IRS by Etsy. This has some sellers concerned that their 2019 1099s will include the refunded amount. If that happens, the sellers could potentially owe taxes on money they never earned.

Oh, and don't forget the credit score dings that people whose cards went over the limit could potentially suffer, end quote. Elroy Air is a maker of delivery drones that can carry up to 500 pounds. It has raised $9.2 million in seed funding from a $1. range of new and existing investors it was announced in just the past couple of days. I find the drone space interesting, and even more so, when it overlaps into the delivery space and the autonomy space that we're always talking about these days. Here's how Venture Beat describes Elroy Air's VTOL, or Vertical Takeoff and Landing unmanned drone prototype, quote, much like Elroy's full-scale prototype, the aluminum falcon, the Chaparral,

is equipped with a bevy of sensors including LiDAR cameras and radar along with an onboard computer running air traffic management software. It sports a hybrid gas electric power train that Elroy claims emits fewer pollutants than conventional engines and which isn't reliant on any sort of battery

charge infrastructure plus propellers and wings that carry it in flight. The Chaparral can carry between 200 and 500 pounds of cargo, a lot of weight for aircraft with a 300-mile range. Fortunately, humans aren't tasked with the heavy lifting. Elroy has a self-guided cargo handling machine with a ground navigation system that can load and unload packages all by itself.

Elroy Air envisions its drones someday delivering not only goods to customers in remote places and traffic choked urban centers, but care packages and medical supplies to victims of natural and man-made disasters, end quote. So again, to fit this into the larger autonomous vehicle, and delivery narrative, imagine an entire supply chain or delivery network of completely autonomous vehicles from end to end, from ship to warehouse, from warehouse to warehouse, then warehouse to road and road to door. But at least that first part of the chain, the ship to hub or hub to hub part. Imagine that delivered in the air by autonomous drones. This seems eminently doable to me, assuming that this technology works out, but it seems eminently doable today. Finally today,

since a lot of you listening in the U.S. have the day off, I thought I'd end with a mini long-reed suggestion for you, just one. When we talk about autonomous vehicles becoming reality in smaller, perhaps easier, or bespoke use cases, we're essentially talking about the minimum viable product paradigm. The maximally viable product, if you will, are self-driving cars faring real live people on real live roads. But that's the maximal case because it's the most complicated. What about minimally viable cases like tiny Death Star-like delivery drones bringing me a burrito or autonomous golf carts on college campuses or delivery drones shuttling 500 pounds of freight between hubs because in the air autonomy is easier to achieve than it is down here on the messy ground.

Waymo is aiming for maximal. But what if minimal really is the best path to market? In Ars Technica, friend of the podcast, Timothy B. Lee, looks at a pretty interesting historical parallel here. If you know your Silicon Valley history, you'll know that Xerox pioneered the graphical user interface, the revolution that took computing mainstream. But they tried to come to market with that technology fully flushed out, the maximal version of the graphical user interface. Apple, and eventually Microsoft, conversely, cherry picked the minimal bits from the GUI, went to market with a minimally viable product,

gradually moved up market and in the end won the computing game instead of Xerox, quoting Tim's piece. Today, a number of self-driving startups are aiming to do to Waymo what Apple did to Xerox years ago. Nero is a driverless delivery startup that announced Monday that it raised 940 million in venture capital. Another called Voyage is testing a self-driving taxi service in one of the nation's largest retirement communities. right now these companies self-driving services aren't as sophisticated as Waymo's. Their vehicles have top speeds of 25 miles per hour. But Apple started out making underpowered products too, then it gradually worked its way up market, ultimately eclipsing Xerox. If Waymo isn't strategic, companies like Neuro and Voyage could do the same thing to the pioneering self-driving company.

Google founder, now Alphabet CEO Larry Page, of course, knows all about Xerox mistake. and is determined to avoid repeating them. Quote, they weren't focused on commercialization, Paige said of Xerox in a 2013 interview with Wired. According to the information's Amir Afradi, Paige has been pushing for Waymo to commercialize since at least 2016. But Page may be drawing the wrong lesson from the Xerox experience. Xerox did try to commercialize its technology.

It just didn't have a good strategy for doing so. And it's not clear that Waymo does either, end quote. So super provocative and actually reasonably long piece. I mean, Waymo is Alphabet's moonshot project par excellence, right? And the very definition of a moonshot is probably a maximalist product, right? But minimum viable product is a mantra for a reason. And as Tim posits at the end of his piece, maybe sometimes the best way to get big is to start small.

That's all for today. Those of you who have had it off, I hope you enjoyed it. President's Day is never a day that I can get a handle on. Is it just an East Coast holiday? I feel like in the South it was never a thing when I was growing up. You might have noticed holidays always seem to perplex me. Anyway, talk to you again tomorrow.