Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/12 – Some Apple Rumors Before Pixel Day

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Hey, want to know the iPhone product road map for the next year or so? I wonder why that’s coming out today? Instagram is copying something it forgot to copy from Snapchat. Celsius wants a ton of bitcoin back from Tether. Flux continues to wow, and is Iran the biggest cyber threat of this election year. Sponsors: Ramp.com/techmeme WashingtonPost.com/ride Links: Apple’s iPhone 16 Will Keep Sales Stable Until Bigger Changes Arrive (Bloomberg) Instagram is testing its own take on Snap Map (The Verge) Amid Layoffs and CPU Controversy, Intel Postpones Innovation Event (PCMag) Celsius targets Tether, Badger DAO, Compound, and Netanyahu's niece and nephew in lawsuits (The Block) Forget Midjourney — Flux is the new king of AI image generation and here’s how to get access (Tom's Guide) Iran Emerges as the Most Aggressive Foreign Threat to U.S. Election (WSJ) 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, August 12th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Hey, want to know the iPhone product roadmap for the next year or so? I wonder why that's coming out today.

Instagram is copying something if forgot to copy from Snapchat. Celsius wants a ton of Bitcoin back from Tether. Flux continues to wow. And is Iran the biggest cyber threat of this election year? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Ah, yes, we have a Google event tomorrow. so just like clockwork, Mark German has a bunch of exclusive gossip about the iPhone 16 lineup, also a new iPhone SE maybe, a thin air model in the iPhone 17 series, and a watch SE with a plastic case in bold colors, quoting Bloomberg.

The non-pro versions of the iPhone 16 will add the action button, which was already on the higher-end versions of last year's model, but Apple is rolling out a more customizable control center and changeable lock, options in iOS 18, which make the action button less of an asset. Speaking of buttons, there will be a new camera control on the right side of the phone, at least on the new pros. It will operate like a button on a DSLR camera, allowing you to press in slightly to trigger autofocus.

A harder press will take the picture. You can also swipe along the button to zoom in and out while shooting photos and videos. Another change is probably coming only to the pro model's slightly bigger screens. The regular pro will move to 6.3 inches from 6. 1, while the Pro Max will now approach 6.9 inches, an increase from 6.7. As usual, the colors will be refreshed for the pro expect to see the blue replaced, along with a return of the popular rose gold from a few years ago, and there will be a new chip, the A18. All four models will now

have 8 gigabytes of memory as well. That's the minimum needed to run Apple Intelligence. Next year is certain to bring a bigger shake-up in the iPhone line. As early as the beginning of 2025, Apple will launch a new iPhone SE, the first upgrade to its low-end phone since 2022. This model will look like an iPhone 14 with a CRISPR OLED display that stretches across the full device, and you can also bet that it will have Apple intelligence. If Apple can get the price of the new iPhone SE down to around $500, I think it could be a hot seller. But the more important changes will appear next September with the iPhone 17. That lineup will offer a new type of smartphone, what I call the fourth iPhone model.

main lineup has three major options, the standard iPhone, the pro, and the Pro Max. For years, Apple has been looking to find a fourth type of phone that will resonate with customers. In 2020, it attempted to do that by rolling out the iPhone 12 Mini. That product was a commercial failure. So the next logical move was going in the opposite direction. Apple got rid of the Mini and came up with the iPhone 14 Plus, a larger version of its standard phone. Just like the Mini, the Plus has also largely been a flop. One problem is the price. The iPhone 15 Plus is only $100 less than the more powerful iPhone 15 Pro, so many consumers figure it's worth shelling out a bit more money for the better phone. Next year, however, Apple will give this fourth model concept another try. The approach this time around, a far thinner design. The idea is to create an Air version of the iPhone of sorts, something that sits in between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 Pro. The most apt comparison is probably to the original MacBook Air from over a decade ago, which was somewhere between the regular MacBook and MacBook Pro.

the sales pitch will probably go like this. If you want something snazier than a standard iPhone, but don't really need the performance screen size or cameras of a pro model, you can get something that looks much cooler while still having the specifications of a regular iPhone. The combination of the new SE and Slim model could be good enough to return the iPhone to meaningful growth in 2025. I think the Air Style phone will at least be a bigger hit than the mini and plus devices of recent years. But even this slimmer entry will just be a step towards something better. Eventually, Apple will want to squeeze the power of a pro model into this smaller design. That feat will likely take until at least 2027 to achieve.

I also expect Apple to produce a foldable iPhone, but all signs internally point to a foldable iPad being just as big of a priority. That means we may still see a tablet version come sooner, end quote. You don't have to copy every feature right away, I guess. You can always just go back to the well when you're out of ideas again if there's something that you forgot to copy. Instagram is testing a Snap Maps-like feature that lets users post-text and video updates to a map that can be shared with friends. Quoting the Verge. It is pretty much just Snap Maps, which was originally launched in 2017. The difference for now seems to be that Instagram may have much more limited privacy settings. Users have to choose a specific group of people to share their location with, such as close friends or only followers, they follow back.

Christine Pye, a meta-spokesperson told The Verge. Snapchat allows public posts to SnapMaps itself. Instagram's feature is currently only available as a small test in a few markets, Pye said. The tool is opt-in and includes controls over location sharing. As always, we are building this feature with safety in mind, Pye said. She didn't immediately respond to follow-up questions about whether, fully public sharing would be offered or how long the post would stay up for. The map's feature was first spotted in development back in February under the name Friend Map. Then this week,

some images of the features in use began trickling out into public. I didn't say where the feature is currently being tested. Instagram had a photo feature back in 2012 that placed all of your images on a map, but the feature was entirely private. It couldn't be shared with friends and only included your own images. It was a fun way to look over your photo collection, but the company shut it down four years later, citing low usage. If it rolls out widely, the Maps feature would be a throwback to something Instagram has always done well, ripping off ideas from its competitors. Stories came from Snapchat, reels from TikTok, and if we're calling this an Instagram feature, threads from Twitter. Now it's time to loop back to Snapchat, end quote. This continues to not look good.

Intel has officially delayed its innovation event slated for September, and expected to include details about new CPUs. The delay is till 2025, apparently, and Intel is citing its financial results and its second half of the year outlook as the reason why. Quoting PCMag. Intel Innovation, one of the company's biggest gatherings was originally scheduled for September 24th and 25th in San Jose, California. But on Thursday, the company began notifying attendees that the event will be pushed back. After careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone our Intel hosted event, Intel Innovation, in September until 2025. the company said in a notice on the event's website. In a statement, Intel told PCMag,

quote, given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected, we are having to make some tough decisions as we continue to align our cost structure and look to assess how we rebuild the sustainable engine of process technology leadership. We express sincere appreciation to our partners, sponsors, exhibitors, developer communities, and our larger team who had committed to support and attend the event, end quote. Last week, the U.S. chipmaker reported it plans to lay off about 15,000 employees to help control costs, which have ballooned in its push to expand its chip manufacturing and R&D. Intel innovation looks like another casualty as the company prepares to slash spending in areas including

marketing and administrative operations. Still, delaying the event might hinder Intel's efforts to promote upcoming desktop and laptop processors, including Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. That said, the company might simply shift its messaging to IFA, a major consumer electronic show, in Berlin, going on September 6th through the 10th, end quote. This is a weird sort of throwback story. Celsius has sued Tether. Actually, apparently they did so all the way back on August 9th, to try to claw back around $40,000, now worth around $2.4 billion, that Celsius claims Tether sold improperly at the bottom of the market, quoting the block. When prices began to slide in early

2022, Tether requested more collateral from Celsius to prop up its loans, which the lender transferred over in the form of Bitcoin on several occasions throughout May and June. Celsius also took out an additional $300 million in USDT in loans beginning in April 2022, crucially within 90 days of Celsius's bankruptcy filing that July. Without these transfers, the lawsuit argues, Tether would not have been able to come close to making itself whole on its $812 million USDT loan to Celsius and, quote, Tether would have had over $350 million less in collateral had the transfer's not been made. According to the lawsuit, after Celsius satisfied Tether's request for over 3,000 Bitcoin worth of additional collateral on June 12, 2022, worth about $350 million at the time,

the stable coin issuer requested a second collateral demand. While Celsius was allegedly putting together the funds during a contractually mandated 10-hour waiting period, Tether decided to liquidate Celsius' complete collateral the 39,000 Bitcoin within just hours. Celsius' lawsuit alleges that the lender could have come up with the Bitcoin had it been given the full-time allotted by the contract. If Celsius had been given the opportunity to meet the collateral demand, which it had the contractual right to do, it could have been able to avoid the disposition of its Bitcoin at near the bottom of the cryptocurrency market. Instead, that disposition was carried out for the benefit of just one creditor, Tether, the lawsuit states, though the lawsuit also admits,

amidst the chaos of June 13, 2022, Celsius's CEO Alex Mischinsky, allegedly gave Tether permission to liquidate Celsius's collateral in an orderly manner, end quote. The lawsuit notes that Tether only received an average price of $20,656 per Bitcoin, which the lawsuit notes is, quote, considerably below Bitcoin's low price of 22,808 on BitFinex, a crypto exchange controlled by Tether's parent company around the time when the collateral was allegedly liquidated, end quote. Tether, in a blog post, vigorously denied wrongdoing. Time to hit you again to what was the the new hotness on the internet over the weekend. Flux is an open-source AI image generator from the startup Black Forest Labs. It's gone viral for creating new ultra-realistic images of people,

like Next Generation ultra-realistic. I believe we spoke about Flux and Black Forest Labs before, but people are like, The Uncanny Valley is almost dead with this thing. Quoting Tom's guide, the AI Image Generation model is being dubbed the rightful air to stable a fusion, and it quickly went viral after its release with direct comparisons to market leader mid-jurney. The difference between Flux and Mid-Journey is that Flex is open-source and can run on a reasonably good laptop. This means it is or will be also available on many of the same multimodal platforms like Poe, Night Cafe, and FreePick as Stabled Fusion. I've been using it, and my initial impressions are that in some areas it is better than Mid-Journey, especially around

rendering people, but its skin textures aren't as good as Mid-Journey version 6. point one. Flux came from AI startup Black Forest Labs. This new company was founded by some of the people responsible for most modern AI image generation technologies. The German-based company is led by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blatman, and Dominic Lawrence, all former engineers at Stability AI, along with other leading figures in the development of diffusion-based AI models. This is the technology that also powers many AI video tools. There are three versions of Flux currently available, all text image models. The first is a pro version with a commercial license and is mainly used by companies like FreePick to offer its subscribers access to generative AI image technology. The second two

are Dev and Schnell. These are the midweight and fast models. And in my tests running on a laptop with an RTX 4090, they outperform mid-jorney, also Dolly, and even ideogram in adherence to the prompt, image quality, and text rendering on an image. The company is also working on a text to video model that it promises will offer high-quality output and be available open source, branding it state-of-the-art text-video for all. If you have a well-equipped laptop, you can download and run Flux locally. There are some easy ways to do this, including by using the Pinocchio launcher. This makes it relatively trivial to install and run AI models with a couple of clicks and is free to use. It is a large file, though. However, if your machine isn't up to the job, there are several

websites already offering access to flux, and in some cases, this includes the largest commercial pro model. Nightcafe, which is one of my favorite AI image platforms, already has access to the model, and you could quickly compare that to images from other tools like ideogram and stable diffusion 3, end quote. Finally today, you might have heard over the weekend that the Trump campaign was reportedly hacked. No real fallout from that that I've seen so far, but the Wall Street Journal says people are pointing the fingers at Iran, as Microsoft has detailed that that country has emerged as the most aggressive foreign threat to this U.S. election season. Quote, on Saturday, the Trump campaign said it had been hacked by, quote, foreign sources hostile

to the United States in a breach the campaign linked to Iran. An anonymous source that called itself Robert had shared apparently stolen internal Trump campaign files with reporters at several media organizations hoping to see the material published. The White House was unaware of the hack and leak campaign, first learning of it from Politico's Saturday report, which detailed the breach to administration officials said. The Biden administration still hasn't made a formal determination of responsibility. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has only confirmed it is aware of public reports, but has declined to comment further. The White House isn't always immediately informed when intelligence or law enforcement investigations into such matters begin.

Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, said cybergroups connected to Iran had in recent weeks expanded its election influence efforts on several fronts. The tactics observed include launching covert news sites driven by artificial intelligence to target voters and separate efforts to prepare to incite violence against political figures and cast out on the integrity of the election. First, they've laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and begun to activate these campaigns in an apparent effort to stir up controversy or sway voters, especially in swing states. Watt said in a blog post. Second, they've launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain

intelligence on political campaigns and enable them to influence the elections in the future, end quote. In an election season already rocked by an assassination attempt against Trump and President Biden's late decision not to seek re-election, Iran has added to the list of surprises by becoming the most active and serious foreign adversary trying to disrupt the contest. In addition to the cyber-enabled election influence operations, Iran was connected to another plot to assassinate Trump, to federal prosecutors and other officials. U.S. officials have also previously renewed security protection of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials because of fears Iran could try to kill him, following his role in the assassination of Iran's Qasim Soleimani. The Kremlin is

still widely seen as more adept at covert propaganda than Tehran and possesses more resources and technological expertise. Russia, however, was committed to waging a, quote, whole-of-government influence campaign on the election, U.S. intelligence officials said, in their July media briefings. But so far, Iran has demonstrated the most eagerness to disrupt the election despite being mired in regional confrontations that could ignite a broader war in the Middle East, end quote. Tomorrow is the big pixel event from Google, by the way. I haven't decided if I'll cover it tomorrow since everything has already leaked. It will be a game time decision, probably, but if the show is a few hours late, you'll know that I waited to give you that right

away. We'll see. Talk to you tomorrow.