Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/26 – New AirPods And AirPods Pro This Spring?

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 for Monday, October 26, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. New AirPods and AirPods Pro coming as soon as the spring.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Facebook launches streaming gaming everywhere, but guess where? Ant is the biggest IPO in history. SAP seems to be having COVID issues. And are you still working from home? Well, maybe keep an eye on your ISP's data caps. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Mark German and Debbie Wu are reporting in Bloomberg this morning that Apple is working on third-generation entry-level AirPods that they believe will continue not

Starting point is 00:01:11 to have noise cancellation. But at the same time, Apple is apparently also working on a smaller second-gen version of the AirPods Pro, quote, The design of the updated entry-level AirPods will be similar to the current AirPods Pro, gaining a shorter stem and replaceable ear tips. Apple is also looking to improve battery life. That model, however, will not have higher-end AirPods Pro features like noise cancellation, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. For the new AirPods Pro, Apple is aiming to make the earbuds more compact by eliminating the short stem that currently sticks out from the bottom. A design in testing has a more round shape that fills more of a user's ear, similar to the latest designs

Starting point is 00:01:53 from Samsung and Amazon and Google. Integrating noise cancellation, wireless antennas, and microphones into a smaller AirPods Pro casing has proved challenging during development, which could result in a less ambitious design when the product is finalized. people said. And Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. Apple has internally discussed launching the new low-end AirPods during the first half of next year. The company is also planning new wireless chips to power both models, end quote. Something Something Gaming will be the wedge to crack open the app store. Facebook announced it is launching free-to-play cloud gaming on desktop and Android, but they took the time to note that they are unable to bring these same games to iOS due to Apple's

Starting point is 00:02:40 quote, arbitrary policies. Quoting from CNBC, Facebook's web and Android users can try free-to-play games in seconds without leaving the social network. Users play a game that's streamed from Facebook's data centers without having to first download the game onto their devices. The idea is similar to services offered by Microsoft and Google, but without the console-quality games offered by those services.

Starting point is 00:03:02 The exclusion of Apple devices from Facebook cloud gaming is the latest shot fired at a long-running feud between the companies. Facebook could bring cloud gaming to Iowa, if it enables the new product on the mobile web version of its service, but the company wants users to go to its apps instead, said Jason Rubin, Facebook's vice president of special gaming initiatives. Quote, we don't want people going to web Facebook 20 times a day. We have a great app, Rubin said.

Starting point is 00:03:26 We would have to use Apple's technology and browser on iOS, and that isn't optimized to the benefit of cloud games, end quote. Facebook Cloud Gaming on iOS would allow iPhone and iPad users to find out what games their friends are playing, see lists that show top. games on Facebook or play games with Facebook unique features, Ruben said, end quote. Ant Group is about to raise $34.5 billion in its dual Shanghai and Hong Kong IPOs, valuing Ant at $313.37 billion, thereby officially making it the biggest share listing or

Starting point is 00:04:05 IPO of all time, quoting CNBC. The Chinese financial technology giant previously said it would split its stock issuance equally across Shanghai and Hong Kong, issuing 1.67 billion new shares in each location. Ant's valuation based on the pricing will be $313.37 billion, larger than some of the biggest banks in the U.S., including Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. Ant Group is expected to start trading in Hong Kong on November 5, according to the regulatory filing. The company has not disclosed when its Shanghai shares will begin trading, end quote. As Joe Wiesenthal pointed out on Twitter, with this IPO pricing, Jack Ma's Ant Financial is going to be bigger than J.P. Morgan and four times bigger than Goldman Sachs. Yeah, forget about Asian super apps. What about Asian super banks? Though,

Starting point is 00:04:55 of course, Ant really is both, quoting the New York Times. For hundreds of millions of people in China, ants app Allipay may as well be a bank. It is their credit card, debit card, mutual fund, and even insurance broker, all on a single mobile platform. It is a lender to small businesses, both online and off, that might otherwise be ignored by China's big state-run banks. AliPay has more than 730 million monthly users more than twice the population of the United States. By comparison, PayPal has 346 million active accounts. Like other giant internet companies, Ant says its strength lies in performing a large number of different tasks at once. The more people use AliPay to purchase lattes, for example,

Starting point is 00:05:36 the more data it gathers about their spending power. Ant says this information helps it offer loans, investments, and insurance policies that suit users' needs. The data also helps Ant and its partner banks determine who is likely to pay them back, end quote. On the flip side of the spectrum, SAP is a company that we don't often cover, but it's probably worth noting this. SAP shares have dropped as much as 21%, the biggest intraday fall since 1999, as profit and sales at that company have declined, thereby necessitating that SAP cut its revenue forecast for the full year, quoting Bloomberg. In a test for Christian Klein, who became sole chief executive officer in April, the pandemic will delay SAP's goals for cloud revenue, overall sales and operating profit by one or two years, especially in hard-hit industries

Starting point is 00:06:28 such as business travel, the Germany-based company said in a statement on Sunday. The drop in shares on Monday wiped $28 billion, or $33.1 billion, off of SAP's market value. The drop-off in SAP's cloud revenue is a sign that companies are putting off major decisions about updating their software as the pandemic continues to limit any global economic recovery. SAP says it expects limited growth and margin improvement over the next two years and moved expectations to meet its 2020 strategy plan out to 2025. Klein said on a call Monday he expects a conservative recovery into the first half of next year, end quote.

Starting point is 00:07:04 We've been talking a lot about regulation of tech, but not so much. much this sort of regulation. The New York Times is reporting that various right to repair laws and initiatives are gaining ground with proposed regulations in the U.S. and EU that would force companies to share parts, tools, and other repair info with consumers and repair shops so that, you know, you could actually repair and not just trash and replace your devices, quote. Manufacturers of a wide range of products have made it increasingly difficult over the years to repair things. For instance, by limiting availability of parts or by putting prohibitions on who gets to tinker with them. It affects not only game consoles or farm equipment, but cell phones,

Starting point is 00:07:50 military gear, refrigerators, automobiles, and even hospital ventilators, the life-saving devices that have proven crucial this year in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, a movement known as right to repair is starting to make progress in pushing for laws that prohibit restrictions like these. This August, Democrats introduced a bill in Congress to block manufacturers' limits on medical devices. spurred by the pandemic. In Europe, the European Commission announced plans in March for new right-to-repair rules that would cover phones, tablets, and laptops by 2021. In less than two weeks, Massachusetts voters will consider a measure that would make it easier for local garages to work on cars. And in more than 20 state houses nationwide, right-to-repair legislation has been introduced

Starting point is 00:08:30 in recent years by both Republicans and Democrats. Over the summer, the House advanced a funding bill that includes a requirement that the FCC complete a report on anti-competitive practices in the repair and present its findings to Congress and the public. And in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Marine Captain L. Ekman and former Marine Lucas Kuntze, last year detailed how mechanics in the American armed forces have run into similar obstacles. The goal of right-to-repair rules, advocates say, is to require companies to make their parts, tools, and information available to consumers and repair shops in order to keep devices from ending up in the scrap heap. They argue that the rules restrict people's use of devices that they own and encourage a throwaway culture by making

Starting point is 00:09:11 repairs too difficult. They also argue that it's part of a culture of planned obsolescence, the idea that products are designed to be short-lived in order to encourage people to buy more stuff. That contributes to wasted natural resources and energy use at a time when climate change requires movement in the opposite direction to rain in planet warming emissions, end quote. Sounds like a good idea, right? But I thought I would share what Kate Bevin said about this on Twitter, quote, this is a great movement, but there are two problems. First, First, software updates or lack thereof. Android devices are out of support after three years.

Starting point is 00:09:46 Second, batteries. They have finite lives and are engineered to squeeze the most life out of them in the tiny space of the phone. First is well beyond most ordinary consumers. The second would mean worse battery performance. I think it's a great movement, but I'm pointing out the quite significant hurdles, end quote. Fresh round of outrage about what I'm about to tell you, which I won't take the time to tally up. but Oculus owners will reportedly lose all store purchases and account information if they should dare to delete their Facebook accounts, quoting Upload VR.

Starting point is 00:10:25 If you've linked your Oculus account to Facebook and you decide you want to delete your Facebook account, your purchases on Oculus will be lost as well. While Facebook is required for Quest 2 usage, we confirmed directly with Facebook that if you're an owner of the original Quest, Rift, or RiftS, and you're not getting another Oculus headset and have held out from linking your accounts for this long, you could still delete your unlinked Facebook account for now and your Oculus store purchases would be unaffected. Starting in 2023, however, Facebook will no longer support Oculus accounts and details are still unknown about how exactly that will work. Conversations surrounding the account deletion policy continues to

Starting point is 00:11:01 unfold, and there was a recent House subcommittee report which seemed to suggest Congress would view policies like Facebook's as anti-competitive. The Oculus support website says it will refund orders returned within 30 days of when the order shipped, end quote. But hey, it also came out last week that beginning next year, simply playing Minecraft will require a Microsoft account. So, I don't know, maybe hope your favorite gaming system never gets acquired by a major tech platform. Sources are saying Facebook is taking things very seriously a week ahead of the U.S. presidential election, prepping responses to possible post-election unrest, like slowing the spread of viral

Starting point is 00:11:45 content with tools it has used before in countries like Myanmar, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The emergency measures include slowing the spread of viral content and lowering the bar for suppressing potentially inflammatory posts, the people said. Previously used in countries, including Sri Lanka and Myanmar, they are part of a larger toolkit developed by Facebook to prepare for the U.S. election. Facebook executives have said they would only deploy the tools in dire circumstances such as election-related violence, but that the company needs to be prepared for all possibilities, said the people familiar with the planning. The potential moves include an across-the-board slowing of the spread of posts as they start to go viral and tweaking the

Starting point is 00:12:24 newsfeed to change what types of content users see, the people said. The company could also lower the threshold for detecting the types of content its software views as dangerous. Deployed together, the tools could alter what tens of millions Americans see when they log on to the platform, diminishing their exposure to sensationalism, incitements to violence, and misinformation, said the people familiar with the measures. But slowing down the spread of popular content could suppress some good faith political discussion, a prospect that makes some Facebook employees uneasy, some of the people said. Quote, we've spent years building for safer, more secure elections, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, we've applied lessons from previous elections,

Starting point is 00:13:03 hired experts, and built new teams with experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios, end quote. So I guess that's reassuring, except for the fact that Facebook. Facebook is considering measures it's used in the past to curb civil wars and genocide here in the United States of America. So, you know, how does it feel to live in a country where such measures might actually need to be used? And finally today, when the whole quarantine slash work-from-home thing began, the internet service providers in North America did a good thing by waving data caps temporarily so folks wouldn't be overly disrupted. I mentioned temporary, and now users working from home are increasingly hitting their internet usage limits as ISPs reinstate those data caps they suspended at the beginning of the pandemic.

Starting point is 00:13:57 ISPs have long claim that data caps were necessary to prevent undue strain on networks, but as I speculated on before, the fact that home internet usage was maybe the highest it's ever been and yet things have been pretty okay, doesn't that kind of put paid to that whole notion of data caps are necessary? Well, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The internet's backbone held up pretty well during the early days of the pandemic, despite significant pressure. We've lived through this scenario and did well without caps on bandwidth usage, which makes you question why they are needed at all, said David Chaffniss, an associate professor at the Corey College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Providers have attributed strong internet performance to round the clock work

Starting point is 00:14:41 being done on the network, which was possible because of billions of dollars of further investment. The size of the cost is another reason why providers say heavy users are often asked to pay more. In September, U.S. households used an average of 383.8 gigabytes of data, according to Open Vault. So far, this month, consumption has increased to 413.3 gigabytes. This is up from 361 gigabytes in January, which had been the latest monthly record of usage prior to the pandemic. Comcast said, even with pandemic usage, 95% of its customers don't reach its limit, which it recently up to 1.2 terabytes from 1 terabyte. For some Comcast subscribers, the price of unlimited packages has also been lowered, a spokeswoman said. Similarly, Cox raised its data allowance

Starting point is 00:15:24 by 25% to 1.25 terabytes a month, and it waives the overage fee the first time a customer exceeds their data allowance, according to a spokesman. Verizon Communications, consumer unit chief Ronan Dunn said the average subscriber of its Fios service uses more than 500 gigabytes a month without taxing the fiber optic systems infrastructure so the company doesn't charge fees to reduce consumption, end quote. Thanks for all the kind words about the Internet History podcast episode this past weekend. I'm glad to have that show back as well. If you know someone that I should talk to for an IHP episode sometime in the future, get in touch,

Starting point is 00:16:05 send them my way. And also a little early warning. Next week, I think we'll try to do another listener, Colin, weekend bonus. episode. Problem is, of course, the election is next week also, so I don't know. Maybe people won't be able to think about anything else next week. We might have to postpone. But if things are quiet enough, maybe we'll record a listener call on episode Thursday night next week, maybe at 9 p.m. Eastern, so West Coast people can participate more. I don't know. As I say, we'll play it by ear and let you know next week. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/26 – New AirPods And AirPods Pro This Spring?

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