Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/06 – WWDC 2022

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 Tech meme right home from Monday, June 6, 22. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from WWDC, all the new OSs, a new MacBook Air, a new M2 chip, but I'll save you the speculation. Nothing on the AR or VR front. More bored apes are stolen, more posturing from Elon Musk that he might walk away from the Twitter deal, and is Netflix about to get into live sports? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. was earlier today and for the first time since the pandemic. There was an audience, a meaningful one, full of outsiders and journalists, though, notably the keynote was still a video and the audience

Starting point is 00:01:17 was outside watching it all on big screens. There was no personal stage appearance made by anyone at Apple. First up for the announcements was iOS 16, of course, which features an all-new lock screen as the big headline. They call it the biggest update to the lock screen ever. There are lock screen skinning features, including font selection. There are areas for customization, sort of like the complications on the Apple Watch. You can add widgets. There's intelligent photo curation from your library and photo shuffle. There's a new wallpaper gallery. Again, I feel like they took a bunch of stuff from what they learned from the Apple Watch and put it on the lock screen of the iPhone. There's glancable information from various apps available to insert.

Starting point is 00:02:04 Notifications also now roll in in a sort of lazy Susan style so your notifications don't take over the screen. There's even a new notification style called live activities for live events like sports, Uber status, or what is playing on your music app, etc. Apple beat Elon to the punch because messages got an edit button. You can edit messages after you've sent them. And there's also undo send to retract mistaken messages or grammatical errors and such. and a Mark Threads unread feature. Live text is getting smarter. You can now grab and hold the subject of an image from your photos,

Starting point is 00:02:45 like hover over it with your finger, lift it out of that image, and then drag it over to messages or other apps. Basically, it's a whole Photoshop job in just one touch. Dictation got a big shout out, which is interesting because of the ARVR rumors, just like live text would also play well in an AR setting. the new dictation experience lets you easily and fluidly move between using voice and touch,

Starting point is 00:03:09 all the movie and translation, live text updates. I would say are strategically meant to train people to start to use and expect these features in an upcoming, I don't know, AR headset. That's kind of obvious to me. Shout out to driver's licenses and other IED things in the wallet app. Wallet will now off your identity to other apps as well. And you can even give keys that you might have in your wallet to other people. so say you can let someone have your hotel room key. Apple Pay Later is coming to Apple Pay. It's their version of Buy Now Pay Later with zero interest and no fees for basically anything you want as long as you

Starting point is 00:03:49 buy it with Apple Pay. It requires no integration for merchants beyond just using Apple Pay. Basically, now you'll be able to pay for something with Apple Pay and divide it into four payments interest-free. Apple will handle the finance end of it. Maps got some improvements, which I kind of didn't follow, but again, if you want to beef up maps for something that would later lean heavily into AR, this is sort of laying the groundwork for that sort of thing, stuff like multi-stop routing and the ability to save routing for reuse later. There's an all-new MySports section coming to Apple News. You can pick your teams and leagues, and then they'll curate stories for you, sort of like how the athletic app does it.

Starting point is 00:04:32 There are new parental controls for sharing, new device setup for kids, for photos. Say hello to iCloud Shared Photo Library, a new kind of iCloud library that up to six people can participate in. You can even set up the camera to send photos to a shared library from within the camera app right away. You can even enable that sharing switch to automatically turn on when you're near other people in the shared library that you're using. So, for example, pictures people take on trips together.

Starting point is 00:05:02 would all be shared automatically. There was a bunch of home app stuff, but it didn't seem earth-shattering, just sort of a fresh coat of paint, though they did talk up their adoption of the Matter Smart Home standard. The new version of CarPlay basically can take over the entire dashboard

Starting point is 00:05:17 on your car with new widgets, and you can control everything, even climate control. You can skin and customize the instrumentation with radio controls, speedometer, even widgets. I gotta say it all looked pretty good, but you gotta hope that your car

Starting point is 00:05:32 manufacturer gets on board with this and actually supports it. Like, I'm going to bet right now that Elon Musk will never let CarPlay take over a Tesla interface. Then it was on to Apple Watch, new watch faces, of course, new rich complications, new workouts and metrics in the workout app. Heart rate zones will give you a sense of your intensity level when you're exercising at any time. Intervals in time or distance for things like running have been added, which basically obviates my need for my runkeeper app right there. Also, it tracks targeted heart rate zones while you're working out. The fitness app has finally come to all iPhone users, so you can use it on an iPhone even without an Apple Watch. It will make use of the iPhone's motion sensors. And then another app just got

Starting point is 00:06:18 made redundant for me, which is whatever the sleep app is that I've been using, since there is now a sleep stage mode in Apple's sleep app on the watch, which will track REM, core, and deep sleep stages. Then medications. WatchOS 9 gets a medications app which lets you log when you take medications and get notifications for when you might need to take them. You can even scan your medication labels with the iPhone camera to identify them and then get alerts if you, you know, have set yourself up for a bad drug interaction. Then it was on to the Mac. Guess what? Johnny Shruji introed the M2 chip, the new chip line for Apple Silicon, the M2. is 5 nanometers with 20 billion transistors, 20% more than the M1, 100 GbPS memory bandwidth,

Starting point is 00:07:07 up to 24 gigabytes of unified memory, 18% greater performance than the M1, Johnny claimed. 1.9x faster performance than the latest 10-core PC laptop chip, he said. Hey, it's even physically slightly bigger. The M2 chip has 25% more GPU performance than the M1 at the same power level, 35% more at the max power level. There's a new neural engine and secure enclave, new media engine that supports 8K video. Systems with the M2 will play back multiple streams of 8K and 4K video. And so the first Mac to get this M2 chip, the new MacBook Air. As rumored this bad boy has a more squared off design, less of that doorstopper wedge shape that we've seen on the MacBook Air for years.

Starting point is 00:07:53 It's got MagSafe charging back. It looks impossibly thin. 11 millimeters thin, 2.7 pounds in weight. It's got two thunderbolt ports on one side. It has an actual headphone jack on the other side. It comes in colors, to quote the Rolling Stone song from that old Apple ad, silver, space gray, starlight, and midnight. It has a liquid retina display with a camera notch. The display is 13.6 inches, so it's slightly bigger, thanks to thinner bezels. It also has 500 nits of brightness and 1 billion colors. It only has a 1080P camera, but more on that in a second. Dare I say it, the new MacBook Air looks like an iPad Air sandwich. The new MacBook Air has no fan, but it still has the same 18-hour video playback battery life, Apple says. And get this,

Starting point is 00:08:43 the new power adapter that comes with it has two USBC ports in the little power brick itself and supports fast charging to get to 80% of battery life. just 20 minutes. By the way, the M2 chip is also coming to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which does not get a new design, and in fact, it looked like it still had a touchbar. Did I get that wrong? Did anyone catch that? Anyway, the new MacBook Air starts at $1, 199. The MacBook Pro with this new M2 chip starts at $1399, and the old MacBook Air is sticking around with the M1 chip at $999, which I believe is what it was at before. Then it was on to MacOS. We were wrong about it being called Mammoth, by the way. It is being called MacOS Ventura. There's a new way to keep Windows automatically

Starting point is 00:09:32 organized. There's something called Stage Manager. It's like a single window mode for apps. You can group windows and arrange them and switch between groups. You click on the desktop to make all the windows slide off so you can get files off the desktop easier. Mail got a bunch of features like reminders undo send and scheduled send, and all of that is actually also coming to mail in iOS and iPadOS as well. In Apple's attempt to jump on the passwordless bandwagon, pass keys will now use biometrics built into your Mac. It's basically Apple's name for their Fido Alliance stuff. And in an effort to make Macs more amenable to gamers, given the new Apple Silicon, there's a new Metal 3 with metal effects upscaling that lets you run games and stuff at higher frame rates by rendering lower-res frames and upscaling them.

Starting point is 00:10:25 They demoed Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky to show this off, both of which are coming to Max. But given that the rest of the gaming industry is moving towards streaming and playing on any screen, with no fancy hardware required, no powerful hardware required, has Apple finally jumped on the gaming bandwagon right as it's moving away from a need for powerful Silicon in the first. place. What else? You can now hand off FaceTime calls from an iPhone to a Mac and vice versa. You can use the iPhone as a webcam using continuity. Center stage and portrait mode support comes with this. So, you know, is this Apple's excuse for not giving Mac's decent cameras, as I hinted at before. But it is kind of impressive. The ultra-white camera on the iPhone can even do a top-down view of the desk while one of the other cameras still is looking at you. So you can see the person

Starting point is 00:11:15 talking and, you know, whatever they're working on on their keyboard or on their desk simultaneously, which would make Jeffrey Tubin-type shenanigans easier, I guess. They're apparently working with Belkin to manufacture some mounts to make these easy to put on your Macs, which I got to say, again, the demo for using Desk View was pretty wild. It does kind of make a much better webcam experience possible, but as at Stami on Twitter joked, ship better webcams? Nah. Tape iPhone to laptop? Yeah. Then it was iPad OS's turn. Weather is coming to the iPad, which I never noticed didn't have it. Or is this just Weather Kit? No, actually Twitter tells me, after 12 years without one, the iPad now has a weather app. Huh. They demoed a new app coming later this year called

Starting point is 00:12:07 Freeform. It's basically a whiteboarding app. So look out Figma. It looks like the Notes app, but with FaceTime integration, other collaboration features as well. It's coming not just to the iPad, but also the iPhone and the Mac. I don't know. There was also a lot of stuff about gaming on the iPad, making desktop class apps available for the iPad via SDKs and collaboration and stuff, but I kind of didn't really get moved by any of that. Hit the links in the show notes if iPad OS is your jam.

Starting point is 00:12:36 Stage manager, window management is also coming to the iPad as well, I should say. So for the first time, you can now resize Windows. and use overlapping windows on the iPad. Another thing that Apple seemingly reinvented that's been around forever. And then Tim Cook was back to wrap things up. So no mention of TVOS and more importantly, no mention of anything AR or VR, even any kind of heads up for some sort of AROS that devs could begin developing for.

Starting point is 00:13:06 But hey, you know, when Apple does really big new product lines, they usually do standalone events, right? didn't the Apple Watch have a standalone event? Anywho, all the OSs get developer betas today, public betas in July, available to the public at an unnamed fall date. And that's it. Into editing and recording all this. There was other news, as I always say, but frankly, you might find it familiar, so you might not think this is new news over the weekend. Yuga Labs confirmed that Bored Ape Yacht Club's Discord server was hacked with 200, eath worth of NFTs stolen. The third time a bad actor has impersonated a Yuga Labs run account

Starting point is 00:13:55 on Discord and has thus stolen funds in, I don't know, what day is it? Quoting CoinDesk. The hack took place after the project's community manager Boris Wagner had his Discord account compromise, which the attacker then used to post fishing links in both the official board apes yacht club and its related Metaverse project called OtherSides Discord channels. News of the hack was first reported by Twitter user NFT Herder, who also estimates that $145Eath or around $260,000 was stolen along with the NFTs, tracing the stolen funds back to four separate wallets. Yuga Labs later confirmed the exploit occurred in a tweet of its own, saying it is still actively investigating the incident. It did so 11 hours after NFT Herder's tweet.

Starting point is 00:14:39 Wagner is also the manager of his brother, the Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Richard Wagner, who co-founded an NFT Fantasy Football Club called Spoiled Banana Society with Boris. The attacker also posted a fishing link in the SPS Discord channel, though the message was subsequently deleted, Richard said, Hey, at everyone, we were hacked an hour ago. Hopefully no one clicked on any links. Richard Wagner said in a Discord message at 9UTC. We've got back control of the Discord and Boris's account. Thank God he didn't delete the whole server, end quote. It is unclear if anyone in the SBS channel was affected, though Richard has requested information from the Discord members related to the attack. We'll be getting all the tabs back up in the following days and let us know if there's

Starting point is 00:15:23 anything else he messed with, he said. The Wagner's also run a record label called Metaverse Records. In the same SBS Discord message, Richard independently confirmed that the board apes, Yacht Club and other side discords were also hacked, end quote. And in an SEC filing, Elon Musk accused Twitter of, quote, resisting and thwarting his right to information about bots on the platform, calling it a, quote, clear material breach of his proposed deal. So yeah, quoting CNBC. Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement. The letter signed by Scadden attorney Mike Ringler says, Twitter's shares were down 5% Monday morning. Musk wrote on Twitter last month that his $44 billion

Starting point is 00:16:19 purchase of the company would not move forward until he had more information about the number of fake accounts on the service. Some analysts interpreted the move as a negotiation tactic for a lower price. He said his team would do a random sampling to calculate the number of fake accounts, but Twitter's CEO later explained that non-public information would be necessary to get an accurate count. Twitter executives told staff there's, quote, no such thing as putting the deal on hold as Musk claimed, according to a report in Bloomberg. In Monday's letter, Musk's lawyer wrote that the merger agreement requires Twitter to provide the data Musk requested and disputed the company's alleged claim that it is only required to provide information for the limited purpose of helping

Starting point is 00:16:58 to close the transaction. To the contrary, Mr. Musk is entitled to seek and Twitter is obligated to provide information and data for inter alia any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction. At this point, Mr. Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk's own analysis of the data will uncover. It continues. According to the letter, Musk would agree to ensure anyone reviewing the data would be bound by a nondisclosure agreement and he would not use any, quote, competitively sensitive information if the deal doesn't close. Twitter did not immediately

Starting point is 00:17:38 respond to a request for comment, end quote. So again, Elon Musk. publicly said he wanted to buy Twitter in part to eliminate or at least ameliorate the bot problem, and now he has in a formal quasi-legal way said he was shocked, shocked to discover. Gambling was going on in this establishment, to paraphrase the movie Casablanca. Meanwhile, remember this, quoting Charles Fishman on Twitter, quote, Musk specifically waived the right to further due diligence on Twitter in order to move the Twitter purchase fast. Two weeks ago, Twitter spent days showing Musk from the inside how they discover and disable bots.

Starting point is 00:18:18 Today's musking is pure bluster. Musk will never buy Twitter, end quote. And finally today, Insider is reporting that Netflix is in talks with Formula One to purchase the rights to that sport in the U.S. ESPN, NBC Universal, and Amazon are also interested in acquiring broadcast and streaming rates. But this is notable because, again, live sports is something Netflix said for years it never wanted or needed to do. But at the same time, if any sports angle for Netflix would make sense, it would be this one, since it was that whole drive-to-surve series on Netflix that has basically single-handedly raised the profile of Formula One here in the United States, quoting Insider. Netflix has been holding talks for months, the sources told Insider,

Starting point is 00:19:11 along with Disney-owned ESPN, which has held U.S. Formula One rights since 2017. One person told Insider that Comcast NBC Universal, which held the rights for the previous five years, is in the mix, as previously reported by Sports Business Journal. That person and a fourth source said Amazon is also a bidder. ESPN submitted an opening bid in the region of $70 million, one of the people said, noting that the figure is well below the $100 million that Formula One is now targeting. One of the sources said Netflix talks have grown more serious, but added that the pitch is tricky given that the company doesn't have an in-house sports negotiations. The Los Gatos-based streamer played a role in stoking Americans' interest in the team-based auto racing events, Grand Prix that rollout in swank locations such as Monaco and Montreal, thanks to its long-running documentary series Drive to Survive made by box-to-box films.

Starting point is 00:20:01 ESPN confirmed its talks in a statement from John Suchensky, director programming and acquisitions. We are aggressively pursuing a renewal. We feel that we have a distribution package and event presentation that can't be matched in the industry. and the viewership and exposure growth they have received since returning to ESPN platforms in 2018 is reflective of what we can do for them, he said. It's been a mutually beneficial relationship, end quote. Based on the success of Drive to Survive, it would seem obvious that Netflix would be an interested participant and that Formula One would feel similarly, said Sean Bratchez, the former managing director of commercial operations at Formula One, who was previously ESPN's

Starting point is 00:20:41 executive vice president's sales and marketing, end quote. for you today, because I gotta quickly start editing away. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/06 – WWDC 2022

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