Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/07 - WWDC 2021

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

All the headlines from WWDC 2021. Bezos in space! France brings the first hammer down on this round of anti-competitive action, this time against Google. And Jane Manchun Wong has the details on the upcoming Twitter Super Followers thingy. Sponsors: Netgear.com/bestwifi promocode: tech10 Cybereason.com Links: Jeff Bezos and his brother will fly on Blue Origin's first human spaceflight with auction winner (TechCrunch) Google Settles Antitrust Case Over Advertising Practices (WSJ) Twitter may be close to launching Super Follows, as new research shows what it could look like (The Verge) 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 right home for Monday, June 7th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from WWDC 2021 and Bezos in space.

France also brings the first hammer down on this round of anti-competitive action, this time against Google. And Jane Mention Wong has the details on the upcoming Twitter super followers thingy. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, are you ready for WWDC in like 10 minutes? or less. It was a virtual event again. It opened with Tim Cook speaking to an arena full of Memoji. Actually, it really opened with a fake Tim Cook and a DeLorean in an Apple produce video, which never mind. Sort of surprising to me, they kicked things off by going directly to iOS.

Craig Federigi jumped right into the announcement that FaceTime is getting spatial audio. Machine learning is being applied to FaceTime to cut out background noise. There's a grid video and portrait mode now for FaceTime, which sort of looks like the blurred virtual background that you get automatically from Zoom and Google Meet and other places. You can also schedule FaceTime calls using FaceTime links, and it works with Android and Windows users and on the web as well. So remember back when Steve Jobs originally launched FaceTime and said it would be available to everyone. It's however many years later, and we're basically kind of getting there. Then SharePlay is a new feature that allows you and folks on your FaceTime calls to share things like music and movies while you chat.

You can even cast movies to Apple TV and keep chatting on your handheld device. Interested to hear how the licensing got hammered out for all of that. You're getting the sense, right, that this is sort of an all-out attack on Zoom and Google Meet. I feel like this is by far the most features they have ever added to FaceTime since FaceTime was born. Apple is even opening up the API so other developers can use all of these features. Disney Plus, Hulu, HBO, TikTok, ESPN, NBA, and Paramount are already on board. No mention of Netflix, I will note, unless I missed it. Then it was on to messages. There's a new share with you thing in Apple Music, Apple Photos, where you can basically share stuff, anything you're listening to, photos you're looking at, news articles, Safari Links, podcasts, even Apple. Apple TV shows. There's a new notification summary feature that uses on-device AI to sort of summarize all of those alerts you get throughout the day, sectioning them off into ones that you don't need to act on right away. Also, as expected, messages from actual people won't be included in this,

which seems like a good idea. Plus, now when you turn on, do not disturb. As expected, you can set status updates that automatically get sent to people when they ping you when you don't want to answer right away. A new focus feature allows you to set up work modes, personal modes, and sort of set up what things can and cannot reach you when you're in those modes. So, for example, maybe at work you prioritize and let calendar notifications through every time, but when you're at home with your family, maybe they're completely muted. And these settings, by the way, can be synced across all your devices. Next, we're on to live text. So basically, optical character recognition is being baked right into iOS. You can take a photo of, say, a whiteboard

after a meeting, and then cut and paste the text from that to other places. Plus, it scans the photos of your entire system, so you can now search old photos by text, or search by text in the photo that you're actually working with live. There's also sort of smart characterization, which I would call maybe like Shazam for photos. Like if you have a photo of a dog, iOS can now look up what breed of dog it is. Wallet. Alter wideband is coming to wallet so you don't need to even take your phone out of your pocket to unlock your car or eventually your apartment door or your hotel room door. Apple is also bringing identity cards to the wallet. So if your state participates, you can scan your driver's license, and it's stored securely on your phone for use

anywhere. The TSA is apparently on board with this new feature, which is pretty cool and would be pretty useful. There were improvements to the weather app and Maps apps, which I'll gloss over for now, though. Today I learned that Apple Weather didn't have weather maps all of this time until now. It now has live 3D weather maps that you can swipe over to. Maps them, got snazier driving turn-by-turn navigation, and then weirdly it was onto AirPods, and I thought maybe we were switching to hardware. We were not. There's a new conversation boost for people with mild hearing problems. Basically, AirPods can be used as sort of, you know, hearing aids, though they were careful, of course, not to call it that. AirPods are now in the Find My Network. I'm not

exactly sure how the proximity view they showed actually works, but you can also get a separation alert if you say leave your home or your office without your AirPods, which would be super useful for me. Spatial audio is now coming to TBOS, so you can now use your expensive Apple headphones to get spatial movie sound and whatnot. It was then on to iPad OS, and as expected, comprehensive widgets are coming to the home screen of your iPad. Multitasking got improved with the introduction of some sort of tray thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I felt like functionally it was sort of like the Windows start button or Android app drawer.

But Apple kind of jumped right past that, so I couldn't get a sense of if this was a fundamental rethinking of multitasking on the iPad or not. Tags are coming to notes and not just tags, tags. You can also tag people, basically at them in your notes, and they'll get notifications that they're in a note and can join and collaborate. There's a new quick note feature on iPadOS. Swipe up with your pen from the bottom right of your screen, or I guess with your finger, too. And it's super simple to create a quick note.

Swift Playgrounds got something really interesting. If you're not familiar, Swift Playgrounds is Apple's Learn to Code app for iPad. You can now build apps on the iPad itself in Swift Playgrounds, which I got to say would be really useful for teaching kids to code. but also the ability to build apps for iPhone and iPad right in an iPad. Debs, you'll have to tell me if that's a big deal or just a fun toy feature. It was then on to privacy features generally. New pixel blocking in the mail app of iOS basically continued Apple's onslaught against ad tracking and the like. Safari Intelligent tracking prevention now hides your IP address. on-device processing of a lot of Siri requests is here, and Apple painted that as a privacy

improvement, but all I was thinking was if a lot of Siri requests are passed off to on-device processing, that probably makes things a lot speedier, right? You can now literally phone a friend to help you with account recovery, choose people you trust, and if you ever forget a password or a passcode, you just get in touch with them, and they say, yeah, let Brian back in. Forget two-factor authentication. How about second-degree trusted? authentication. Then correct me if I'm wrong, but did Apple basically launch a VPN service? It's called private relay. And they said it was all of your requests sent through two separate internet relays. Even Apple can't see where you're going on the web and what you do when you're there. So did they

just launch a full-fledged VPN as a part of ICloud Plus? It sure sounded like it. And let me point out that it is joining ICloud Plus along with throwaway email aliases so you don't have to your email addresses with everyone. That's called Hide My Email. And these features are a part of ICloud Plus if you're already subscribing for no additional fee. There was then a bunch of health announces, which weirdly these days is not just a subset of the watchOS news, which brings us to WatchOS. There's a new mindfulness app in there. The sleep app can now measure your sleeping respiratory rate. Tai Chi and Pilates are coming to the workout app. GIF, GIF sharing is coming to the Apple Watch.

On to HomePod stuff. HomePod mini speakers will be able to be installed as Apple TV speakers now. Losless audio and Apple Music is coming to the HomePod Mini later this year. Voice recognition is coming. So if my daughter, say, asked our HomePod Mini to send a message to someone using Siri, Siri would know to send it from her, not from, say, me. But then the big news, Siri is now available for third-party devices. And for such big news, it was kind of glossed over as a blink and you'll miss it mentioned, so maybe we'll have to come back to that. Finally, did you notice we never mentioned macOS this whole time? Well, here you go. The new name for macOS is Monterey. Screen sharing, shared with you. Some of the previous announces we already mentioned are all coming

to macOS. That includes bringing the focus mode over to macOS to help you work on your Mac. You can use a single mouse and keyboard between a Mac and an iPad. I should pause here and say this was the most impressive demo. It's called Universal Control. Seriously, set a MacBook down on a table, set an iPad next to it, and you can just move the cursor between them. You can even drag and drop files between them. You can do this with multiple devices.

You could set up an IMac, a MacBook, and an iPad all on the table, and you can seamlessly work between all three with a single keyboard and mouse. Something, something. The lines between using a Mac and an iPad are getting, well, they're basically getting non-existent. They're almost fully blurred at this point. And guess what? You can finally do AirPlay to the Mac. So basically, you can use an IMac now as an external monitor, just using Airplay. Shortcuts are coming to the Mac. There's a big Safari redesign coming for Macs. Tab and Windows. management are included in the new Safari. Search bar is right inside your tabs. Tabs are more compact. There are now tab groups. But basically, the biggest news was you can share your tabs with your iPhone

in really interesting new ways. Web extensions are also coming to iPhone and iPad. Devs, news, use can use, new APIs, new Swift features, new app store features, always on apps for watchOS, Focus API for third-party apps. A new API called Object Capture, which basically lets you take a bunch of photos with your iPhone of an in-real-life object, and then take all those photos and turn it into an AR object. Swift is getting concurrency. Not sure what that means, but if you do, congrats. The App Store is getting A-B testing for custom app listing pages. In-app events can be surfaced inside the app store. So if you say wanted to promote your live concert inside of Fortnite, you could. Well, of course you can't, but other apps can. Xcode Cloud allows you to collaborate with others

via the cloud, building your app right in the cloud so everyone can participate. All of these software updates are being released this fall. Developer betas are live today. Public betas come next month, and wait for it. If you haven't figured it out yet, there was no way. one more thing. Not a single hardware announced today. Excuse me while Igo has a sad. No worries, Tim Apple. I didn't really want to buy a new MacBook Pro this month anyway. As always, there was other news today. For example, Jeff Bezos says he and his brother, Mark Bezos, will fly on Blue Origin's first human spaceflight on July 20th. Now I guess we know why Bezos moved up the timeline for stepping down from the Amazon CEO role, I guess. Quoting TechCrunch. The Amazon founder announced

the news via his Instagram on Monday morning, revealing that his brother Mark will also be coming along for the ride. Bezos and his brother will join the winner of an online auction Blue Origin is currently hosting, which currently stands at $2.8 million as the highest bid for that seat. The Blue Origin launch of its suborbital reusable New Shepard Rocket on July 20th will be the first time it has ever flown with people on board. It's unusual for a company to make its first ever human space flight a mission with a paying passenger. And now we know that it's also going to be carrying one of the world's richest people. Another bold choice for a first human flight. Virgin Galactic, by contrast, has flown to space multiple times with test pilots and astronauts

before its forthcoming trip with Sir Richard Branson. Elon Musk has also never flown on a SpaceX launch, though he has suggested in the past that he will fly on one of his company's vehicles at some point. Blue Origins New Shepard has flown plenty of times without people, however, and save for the first flight where the reusable booster was lost, has had a complete success for each of those 15 missions, including landing of the booster, except that first time and recovery of the capsule for all of the launches. The New Shepard rocket doesn't go all the way to orbit, but instead flies to the edge of space where passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and an unbutable view of Earth through the capsule's many windows before returning to a

parachute-assisted landing on the ground in Texas near Blue Origins launch site. The auction for Blue Origin's first paying customer seat currently sits at $2.8 million, and it's been there for a while now after the price raised from $1.4 million when Blue Origin opened unsealed bidding on May 19th. The final phase of the auction set for June 12 will, include live online bidding from remaining participants who bump their existing bid to match the high offer, end quote. So there's naturally been lots of joke tweets about this news, but I'll make these three notes personally. Number one, Bezos beats Musk to space. Number two, what if

Musk quickly bid on that auction ticket to force his way onto this flight and thus didn't get beat? Number three, I've heard about dogfooding your own product, but this is taking it really to the next level. France's competition authority says Google agreed to pay a fine of nearly $270 million and promise to make it easier for competitors to use its ad tools. I'm making note of this because this was one of the first antitrust actions in the world in the pipeline, and it looks like it's also among the first to be resolved, quoting the Wall Street Journal. While Google's commitments are binding only in France, they will become a template for how the company could resolve similar complaints from publishers and advertising technology rivals elsewhere, potentially changing

how Google operates its system around the world. A spokeswoman said Google would test its changes, quote, over the coming months before rolling them out more broadly, including some globally, end quote. As part of the case, the French Competition Authority alleged that the company's advertising server, historically known as double-click for publishers and used by most large online publishers to put ad space up for sale, gave Google's online ad auction house ADX in advance. in advertising auctions, in part by providing information about rival bids. The authority also alleged other forms of self-preferencing between Google's advertising technology tools, including AdEx's offering better interoperability options to double-click for publishers. The regulator said

Google has made five general commitments as part of the settlement. They include no longer allowing ADX to use competitors' bids to optimize its own bids and giving rival ad servers equal access to data about advertising auctions, the regulator said. An independent observer will be responsible for monitoring Google's compliance and will report back to French regulators, end quote. Finally today, friend of the show, Jane mentioned Wong, continues scooping upcoming Twitter products. Maybe we need to start a JMW scoop Monday sort of convention like we do with Mark German and Mingchi Quo. Jane says Twitter's upcoming superfollow product will be limited to users over 18 with more than 25 tweets posted in the last 30 days and

more than 10,000 followers. Interestingly, the categories for creators include adult content, quoting The Verge. As Twitter has referenced, one of the main features of super followers will be bonus content such as exclusive tweets for super followers. Wong also discovered a list of content categories that super followers users would choose from to describe their content, such as sports or podcasting, and notes that adult content and only fans are listed as content platforms along with Facebook. Facebook, substack, Patreon, Twitch, and YouTube.

Twitter declined to comment about Wong's latest research on Sunday, but it's previously described the Patreon-like superfollows feature as a kind of subscription, providing an example where a superfollow user charged $4.99 per month for users to get access to perks. It's the latest direct payment feature Twitter has introduced in recent weeks. In May, it began testing Tipjar, which lets users make one-time payments to creators directly on Twitter by clicking a dollar bill icon on their Twitter. Twitter profile. Twitter doesn't take a cut of tip jar donations, which supports several payment options including cash app, PayPal, and Venmo. It's not clear how payments would be structured

for super follows, but it seems likely Twitter would take a percentage, end quote. That's all for today. As ever, I'm going to rush right now to get this out to you hopefully before 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. at the latest. Talk to you tomorrow.