Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/04 – EU Brings The Hammer Down On Apple

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

The EU Commission has fined Apple for stifling music streaming competition. New Macbook Airs with the M3 chip. Why the Apple Car was doomed from day one. Anthropic releases Claude 3 in three different flavors. And if 5G isn’t floating your boat, can I interest you in 5G Advanced? Links: Apple hit with €1.8bn fine for breaking EU law over music streaming (Financial Times) Apple launches new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air with M3 chip, support for two external displays, faster Wi-Fi (9to5Mac) Apple’s Car Was Doomed by Its Lofty Ambitions to Outdo Tesla (Bloomberg) Anthropic unveils Claude 3, surpassing GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra in benchmark tests (VentureBeat) Google-backed Anthropic debuts its most powerful chatbot yet, as generative AI battle heats up (CNBC) Telcos are barely done rolling out 5G networks — and they’re already talking about ‘5.5G’ (CNBC) 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 Monday, March 4th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. The EU Commission has fined Apple for stifling music streaming competition. New MacBook airs with the M3 chip. Why the Apple car was doomed from day one, Anthropic releases Claude 3 in three different flavors.

And if 5G isn't floating your boat, can I interest you in 5G advanced? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The EU Commission this morning fined Apple $1.8 billion for stifling competition from rival music streaming services. This is the EU's third largest antitrust fine ever. Apple plans to appeal, quoting the Financial Times. Margrath Vestager, the Block's competition chief, said that the tech giant had broken EU antitrust rules for a decade by, quote, restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services available outside of the Apple ecosystem, end quote. She said this amounted to abuse of the group's dominant position for music streaming on its app store. Apple said it would appeal against the

decision signaling years of legal fights in EU courts. It said the commission had reached its decision despite failing to, quote, undercover any credible evidence of consumer harm, adding that Brussels reasoning, quote, ignores the realities of a market that is thriving, competitive, and growing fast, end quote. The 1.8 billion euro penalty is the third largest antitrust fine the European Commission has imposed. Google has been fined roughly a total of 8 billion euro over a decade for infringements of antitrust law, although the search giant is contesting the penalties in court. The commission began its investigation into Apple in 2019 after music streaming app Spotify launched a complaint accusing the company of anti-competitive behavior.

EU regulators found that Apple's actions had resulted in users paying, quote, significantly higher prices for music streaming services. The iPhone maker charges 30 percent fees for all sales through the app store, a cost the commission said, had been passed on to consumers in the form of higher subscription charges. As part of Monday's ruling, the commission also banned Apple from blocking apps from offering their services outside the iPhone-makers iOS software. Apple has never previously been fined for antitrust infringements by Brussels, but the company was hit in 2020 with a $1.1 billion fine in France for alleged anti-competitive behavior. The penalty was revised down to $372 million after an appeal, end quote. In a blog post, Apple said, Spotify was the, quote, primary advocate and biggest beneficiary

of the EU's ruling. Spotify pays Apple nothing, they say, and that, quote, free isn't enough for Spotify, quote, Spotify has the largest music streaming app in the world and has met with the European Commission more than 65 times during this investigation. Today, Spotify has a 56% share of Europe's music streaming market more than double their closest competitors and pays Apple nothing for the services that have helped make them one of the most recognizable brands in the world. A large part of their success is due to the app store, a large number of the app store, with all the tools and technology that Spotify uses to build, update, and share their app with Apple users around the world. In 2015, Spotify started working with the European Commission on an

investigation with little grounding in reality. They claimed the digital music market had stalled and that Apple was holding competitors back. Unfortunately, for their case, Spotify continued to grow and thanks in part to the App Store, eclipsed every other digital music business in the world. Over the next eight years and more than 65 meetings with Spotify, the European Commission has tried to build three different cases. With every pivot, they've narrowed the scope of their claims, end quote. I would imagine that this had already been planned and scheduled, but maybe it was planned and scheduled because they figured that ruling was coming today, or maybe I'm being too conspiracy-minded, and this is all a coincidence. Anyway, also this morning, Apple announced

a new 13-15-inch MacBook Air with the M-3 chip, offering an 8-core CPU and up to 10-core GPU, starting at $1,099 or $1299 and shipping on March 8, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The new laptops feature the M3 chip with faster CPU and GPU performance, an upgraded neural engine, and up to 2X faster Wi-Fi. The chip now also supports connecting to up to two external displays at once, finally making up for one of the few feature regressions in the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, sort of. The headline feature of being able to connect two displays at once does come with a slight gotcha.

It only works when the laptop lid is closed. That means you can now have a MacBook Air desk set up with two external displays, but the laptop must stay in clamshell mode. If the lid is open, the air screen is on, and you can only have one active external display, just like the previous M1 and M2 models. This is an improvement for the Apple Silicon era of MacBook Air, but still trails what used to be possible on the Intel Ares. Intel Air, you could connect to external displays and also actively use the laptop's own screen.

As far as specs are concerned, the M3 MacBook Air features a faster 8-core CPU combined with up to 10-core GPU. Apple is also calling the new Air the world's best consumer laptop for AI, thanks to the inclusion of a faster 16-core neural engine. The Wi-Fi radios have been upgraded to support Wi-Fi 6E, which allows for maximum theoretical download speeds that are twice as fast as the previous generation. The overall design of the M3 MacBook Air is the same as the M2 model, featuring the thin bezel screen with camera notch cutout and flat-edged chassis. This is a solid spec bump update for both the 13-and-15-inch sizes. The 13- and 15-inch are available in midnight, starlight, space-gray, and silver. The Midnight Colorway features an adonization seal to reduce visible fingerprints,

as previously introduced on the M3 MacBook Pro last fall, end quote. Note that these are the same price points as before, and also note, as mentioned, that in the announcement post, Apple spent a fair amount of time making the case that the new Air is the best consumer laptop for doing AI things. Expect more of that from Apple this year. In his newsletter this weekend, Mark German said that Apple had a bunch of hardware to release this month and next, but that he did not expect them to have any special event for these announces, so what we just said lines up. Now that the airs are out, German still expects some revamp for the iPad Pro, the first in nearly six years for that device, and the first iPad with an OLED screen. But again, Mark says no specific events until WWDC when it's going to be all about AI, as I said.

His newsletter did, however, include a post-mortem on the Apple Car Project, and Mark says it's simple. It all comes down to how the company set out to build a car. When Apple began work roughly a decade ago, there were two main schools of thought about how to proceed. build a less ambitious electric vehicle with autonomy features in line with models from Tesla. That means the car could drive itself on freeways and some roads, but not everywhere. Or change the world with a full-blown self-driving vehicle, taking passengers from point A to point B with zero intervention from a driver, and make it look like nothing anyone had seen before.

Of course, Apple picked the second approach, and that was the issue. All those years ago, the company thought it could solve a problem, full self-driving, that the auto industry is still struggling to, crack today, all while introducing a groundbreaking design. That challenge proved too difficult for even Apple to overcome. Now, you can understand Apple's hubris around 2014. The company had just upended smartphones, tablet computing, and music playback, and it was about to launch the Apple Watch, which it thought would crush the Swiss watch market. Apple wanted to do the same thing for cars. With that in mind, what was the point of introducing a Tesla clone? That wouldn't revolutionize the industry,

but such a car could have still reflected Apple's design chops and be fully integrated into the company's ecosystem of products. Not a bad proposition for Apple fans. By the time Apple realized their mistake a few years ago, it was too late. All of the design work had focused on a car meant to have no steering wheel or pedals. The company also had sunk billions of dollars in developing a level five self-driving system. The highest level of autonomy. The die was cast. According to someone involved in the decision-making, it was as if Apple had tried to skip the early iPhone models and jump right to the iPhone 10. Instead of just planting a flag in the ground with a good enough car, with an Apple user interface, slick Johnny Ive designed interior and exterior,

and an iPhone-like buying experience, the company bet everything on the wrong horse. Autonomy, end quote. Another day, another one of these. Anthropic has unveiled Claude 3, which it says outperforms GPT4 and Gemini Ultra on some benchmarks, and has added multimodal support for photos for the first time. Also, it's not just one version of Claude 3. There are actually three flavors, if you will, appropriately enough. Opus and Sonnet are available now, and Haiku is coming soon. Quoting Venture Beat.

The star of the lineup is Opus, which Anthropic claims is more capable than any other openly available AI system on the market, even outperforming leading models from rivals OpenAI and Google. Opus outperforms top AI models like GPT4, GPT3.5, and Gemini Ultra on a wide range of benchmarks. This includes topping the leaderboard on academic benchmarks like GSM 8K for mathematical reasoning and MMLU for expert level knowledge. While companies like Anthropic and Google have not disclosed the full parameters of their leading models, the reported benchmark results from both companies imply Opus either matches or surpasses major alternatives like GPT4 and Gemini in core capabilities. This, at least on paper,

establishes a new high watermark for commercially available conversational AI, end quote. Sonnet is the mid-range model, which sort of offers a cost-effective version of Claude 3 for routine data analysis, and Haiku is designed to be the cheapest and the fastest, thus more appropriate for consumer-facing chatbots. That's coming soon. Starting today, Sonnet is powering the publicly available version of Claude Online. If you pay for Claude Pro, you can use Opus. Quoting CNBC. Anthropics said Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,000 words or a sizable book. Think around the length range of Moby Dick or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. Its previous version could only summarize 75,000 words. Users can input large data sets and ask for summaries in the form of a memo,

letter, or story. ChatGBT, GBT by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words. As for multimodal support, that technology enables the program to perform tasks like identifying the breed of a dog and a photo, comparing two pictures of t-shirts, or describing a piece of art, something that Alphabet's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT already offer. The company is opting against adding the ability to generate images, though, as OpenAI and Google's chatbots can. Dario Ammodai said, Anthropic customers aren't clamoring for such a feature, end quote. And quoting Forbes. At $15 per million tokens input, equivalent to the text of 2,500 book pages, and $75 per million token's output, Claude 3 Opus is more expensive than the preview version of OpenAI's GPT4 Turbo,

which costs $10 and $30 per million tokens respectively. Co-founders Dario and Daniela Ammodai told Forbes they expect Opus to be used by businesses that need the most cutting-edge performance for functions like complex data analysis and biomedical research. Claude 3's sonnet by comparison, which is five times cheaper, would make sense for most tasks, they added, with uses ranging from search and retrieval across large data stores, sales forecasting and targeted marketing and code generation. The lowest cost model, Claude3 Haiku, will cost just a fraction of that, handy for live interactions with customers,

content moderation, and in logistics inventory management. All three models will allow for prompts of up to 200,000 tokens, approximately the size of a book, more than the $128,000 supported by GPT4 Turbo. Opus users will be able to request one million token limits for some uses, Anthropics said, matching the ceiling. Google has offered to some users of Gemini 1.5 Pro, end quote. Tomorrow is the six-year anniversary of this show, and those first couple of years. You know what we spent a lot of time talking about? 5G.

We don't tend to talk about that much anymore, do we? Sort of a nothing burger. Though you shouldn't be surprised that telecom companies are thinking about 6G, maybe even 5.5G or 5G advanced, or some such marketing bologna. It's coming whether it seems dumb to us or not. So what might that entail? Well, one rule of thumb for the next few years should be anything new the tech industry announces expect AI to be involved, at least as a rationale, if not actually a tangible reason for the new. Quoting CNBC. 5.5G is expected to power more advanced applications. That includes mixed reality headsets, which are getting more and more powerful with tech giants like Apple launching its Vision Pro and meta-upgrading its. metaQuest Pro headset last year. But it also means some of the things that 5G promised us years ago, such as self-driving cars, un-pilited air taxis, and smart manufacturing enabled via the so-called

internet of things, will start to become a reality too. 5G has been the fastest mobile generation rollout to date, surpassing 1 billion connections by the end of 2022, rising to 1.6 billion connections by 2023 and 5.5 billion by 2030. 5G connections are expected to represent more than half, 51% of mobile connections by 2029, and that is forecast to then rise 56% by 2030. Research and standards have introduced, improved, and finalized several new enterprise-specific features for 5G advanced, including network slicing, the integration of private and public networks, enhancing positioning, and even applications specific to enterprise verticals. Howard Watson, the chief technology officer of British telco giant BT, said that 5.5G will

promise faster uplink speeds, meaning you'll be able to stream video, post things online and play multiplayer games much faster than before. Further benefits to 5G advanced over current 5G telco execs say is that it will make the networks themselves more intelligent through the application of AI and machine learning, while also boosting performance and reducing overall power consumption. With 5G advanced telecoms, firms could start to make more money from their 5G rollouts by charging higher prices. And with a key focus of 5G being enterprise applications, that could be a much more significant moneymaker for network operators than consumers. Telcos haven't yet revealed how much more a 5G advanced data plan will cost compared with 5G,

but analysts expect they'll look to make money from 5G advanced by getting cleverer about subscriptions and using AI and other technologies to operate their networks more efficiently. Chinese telecommunications equipment supplier Huawei expects 2024 to be the year that commercial deployment of 5G advanced officially begins. For Huawei, 5.5G is a network that will be capable of 10GBPS downlink speeds, and in case you're wondering, yes, that is very fast. going to take some convincing for consumers to go from 5G to 5G advanced, given the little noticeable improvement they've seen from their phones upgrading to 5G in the past five years.

But Philip Song, Huawei's chief marketing officer of the carrier business group, said that its important telecos convey the use cases of 5G advanced to consumers well, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.