Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/19 - Are iPhone Sales Really Underwhelming (This Time)?

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

Skype calls on Amazon Echos, Tumblr disappears from iOS, Facebook on a war footing, iPhone sales storm clouds, and the Bitcoin Cash hard fork explained. Links: Skype calling now available on Alexa (The Verge) Tweet Storm on Where Tumblr's Gone (@bluechoochoo) With Facebook at ‘War,’ Zuckerberg Adopts More Aggressive Style (WSJ) Tim Cook defends multibillion-dollar Google search deal despite Apple’s privacy focus (The Verge) Apple Suppliers Suffer With Uncertainty Around iPhone Demand (WSJ) With Facebook at ‘War,’ Zuckerberg Adopts More Aggressive Style (WSJ) Bitcoin Cash Declares War: Why Coming Hard Fork Could Mean Another Split (CoinDesk) One Day After the Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork: Takeaways and Latest Developments (Bitcoin Magazine) 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 Ride Home for Monday, November 19th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Skype calls on Amazon Echoes.

Tumblr disappears from iOS. Facebook is on a war footing. iPhone sales have StormCloud's gathering and the Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork Explained. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Microsoft has announced that it's bringing Skype calling to Alexa-enabled devices this week, including Skype Out, which lets users call mobile and landline phones. So Echo shows will now have the ability to video chat, and once you hook things up in the settings, the whole echo range of smart speakers will now allow you to say, Alexa, call John on Skype. And if he's

in your Skype contacts, there you go. It should be noted that this is just the latest move in the increasing partnerships between Amazon and Microsoft, Alexa and Cortana. Xbox One just got Alexa support in September. There is now an Alexa app for Windows 10, which in theory brings Alexa to any PCs running Windows 10. And just this weekend, Microsoft began selling Amazon Echo devices in its retail stores. So there was an ongoing mystery all weekend after the Tumblr app disappeared from the iOS App Store. Tumblr later said it was working to resolve an issue unspecified, but the speculation online was that the app had been removed for inappropriate content. If you're not familiar, Tumblr has long been a site and a service that in no way shies away from mature and adult content and even images and video.

So the speculation all weekend was, did Apple just realize this? or is their content even more concerning at issue here? At the time of this recording, the app is still unavailable and no one seems to have any more details, so I will point you, as others have done, to this Twitter thread from user at Blue Choochoochooch, one Andrea Lopez, who said, quote, Tumblr gone from Apple App Store.

If this is an adult content thing, I got bad news for them about Twitter. Twitter very permissive about adult content. People just don't joke about it being all porn like they do with Tumblr because most of the people who make these jokes have never used Tumblr. Hearing in Back Channel, there is flare up of a specific type of inappropriate content. In my opinion, one that is also on Twitter, they take down on their own. But we'll see.

BTW, my Back Channel buddy tells me content issue is serious. but it's the kind of thing that flares up on other platforms without getting a whole app taken out of store. So to me, heart of this issue is Apple's inconsistency, not tumblers, end quote. So take that with a grain of salt and everything, but that is basically all we know at the moment. The first part of a two-part interview with Apple's Tim Cook aired last night on Axios's new HBO television show,

and in the interview, the Apple CEO said that some level of government regulation over Silicon Valley is inevitable. Quote, generally speaking, I am not a big fan of regulation, Cook said. I'm a big believer in the free market, but we have to admit when the free market is not working and it hasn't worked here. I think it's inevitable that there will be some level of regulation. To a later question, Cook also responded, quote, I think the Congress and the administration at some point will pass something, end quote.

Also in the interview, Cook defended Apple's continued use of Google as the default search engine on iOS, despite being critical of Google's privacy and data policies generally. Cook said, quote, I think their search engine is the best. Look at what we've done with the controls we've built in. We have private web browsing. We have an intelligent tracker prevention. What we've tried to do is come up with ways to help our users through their course of the day. It's not a perfect thing.

I'd be the first person to say that, but it goes a long way to helping, end quote. As the Verge noted, quote, Apple reportedly makes anywhere from $3 to $9 billion a year from its deal with Google, which sees its search engine made the default search on Apple's Safari browser, Safari Web Search, and elsewhere. Privacy-focused browsers like DuckDuckGo exist, but for Apple, the bump in services revenue from Google, coupled with, a modicum of safari controls seems to trump privacy concerns, end quote. Speaking of Apple, I normally really, really tend to shy away from the seemingly unending rumors one week to the next that, you know, iPhones aren't selling well, the sky is falling. iPhone parts suppliers are slashing revenue forecasts, etc.

But this time, there does seem to be a lot of smoke gathering. For example, Apple's main supplier of face ID tech Lumentum slashed its revenue forecast by 17% recently. That caused Apple's stock to fall 5% on that day alone. Apple's stock is actually down 10% since it reported earnings on November 1st. And then, of course, there is all the hand-wringing about Apple no longer even reporting. iPhone unit sales. So people are spooked.

And what I'm about to read to you is not some reason. rumor from some Apple rumor website. This is a rumor slash report from the Wall Street Journal, which says sources are telling them that Apple reduced production orders for all new iPhone models in recent weeks. iPhone 10R production was slashed in particular by one-third of the initial order of 70 million units. Quote, last week major iPhone suppliers including Corovo, Lumentum, and Japan display cut their quarterly profit estimates, citing a reduction in previously placed orders from a large customer. Apple wasn't named, but the iPhone maker accounts for a third to half of revenue for these companies, according to filings and estimates, end quote.

Peak annual iPhone sales actually came in 2015. Since then, annual unit sales have fallen by around 6% to 217.7 million units annually. Quoting from the end of the journal piece, the freeway of Apple suppliers is littered with roadkill, said Timothy R. Curie, an analyst with the Investment Bank UBS, who tracks the iPhone supply chain. Quote, that's one thing when units are growing and another when units aren't going to grow. There's an argument to be made now. Why take the risk? End quote. Well, this Facebook story just keeps rolling on and on as Facebook stories seem to tend to do.

Over the weekend there were two new pieces to stoke the embers. The Wall Street Journal had a lengthy piece describing how this June Mark Zuckerberg told around 50 top Facebook executives that Facebook was, quote, at war. And he and everyone else at the top of Facebook needed to be more decisive. And that this led to some of those key reorgs across Facebook, which probably explains some of the big executive departures we've seen subsequently. It has even led to strain in the relationship between Zuckerberg and Facebook C.O. Cheryl Sandberg. Quoting from the journal piece, this spring Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg, 49, that he blamed her and her teams for the public fallout over Cambridge Analytica, the research firm that inappropriately accessed private data on Facebook users and used it for political research, according to people familiar with the exchange. Ms. Sandberg later confided in friends that the exchange rattled her, and she wondered if she should be worried about her job.

Mr. Zuckerberg also has told Ms. Sandberg she should have been more aggressive in allocating resources to review troublesome content on the site, said one person familiar with the matter, a problem that the company still struggles to fix, end quote. That, of course, set the Facebook Kremlinologist into motion. CNBC's Steve Kovetch tweeted, quote, There's a contingent at Facebook building a case against Sandberg, and they're talking to the press, end quote. That piece was followed by a New York Times piece describing a Friday Q&A session that Zuckerberg held for all Facebook employees. In an hour-long video conference broadcast to Facebook offices around the world,

Mr. Zuckerberg responded to questions from employees on a range of topics, from Facebook's behavior over the past 18 months to how it should handle leaks to the media. according to three people familiar with the discussion, but not willing to discuss it publicly because it was a private meeting. The idea that Facebook tried to cover up anything was dead wrong, and impassioned Mr. Zuckerberg said, using an expletive in his response, according to these people. Some employees responded with muted applause and cheers, end quote. Thanks New York Times for doing your usual censoring, so I don't have to break my no cursing on the pod streak. But again, back to the Facebook Kremlinologists.

A lot of people seem to think that the leaks leading to these stories are part of an effort to push back on that narrative that Zuckerberg in particular has been checked out. Quoting Dari Obasanjo on Twitter, quote, How can this article be viewed as anything but Zuckerberg's PR team leaking and throwing Cheryl Sandberg under the bus? The narrative is basically that Zuckerberg let Cheryl run the company while he engaged in hobbies like learning Mandarin, and reading two books a month, but now he's back to clean up her mess, end quote. But another popular narrative comes from New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who tweeted, quote, now Zuck is his own wartime conigliary. A hidden premise of almost every Zuckerberg tries to take control of peace,

is that Facebook is somehow controllable. Alternative view. No one understands what the company is or is doing. including those who, quote, run it. I didn't report on this when it happened recently, but WarnerMedia recently announced it was shutting down Filmstruck, the streaming video service that catered to Seneists

with a big back catalog of historic and foreign films. This led to a huge backlash, a change.org petition called Keep Filmstruck Alive that garnered 50,000 signatures, and an organized letter campaign from prominent film directors including Edgar Wright, Guillermo del Toro, Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Coran, and others. Well, on Friday, those directors scored an indirect small victory. The Criterion Collection announced that it will launch its own streaming service featuring classic films in the spring.

The Criterion Collection made up a large part of Filmstruck's library. In a blog post, Criterion described the new Criterion channel as, quote, picking up where the old service left off. Programming director spotlights and actor retrospectives featuring major Hollywood and international classics and hard to find discoveries from around the world complete with special features like commentaries, behind the scenes footage and original documentaries, end quote. The service, as I said, is slated to launch in the spring at a price of $10.99 per month or $100 per year. Finally, today I've been holding on to this story because I'm never sure how newsworthy the infighting in the crypto world ever actually is,

but it's worth noting that Bitcoin Cash has now officially forked. If you're not aware, Bitcoin Cash was actually a fork of regular Bitcoin back in August of 2017. So generally, when these forks happen, it's because the community around a particular coin has different visions for the nuts and bolts of how the blockchain for a particular coin should work going forward. Indeed, Bitcoin Cash was created over arguments about how Bitcoin should scale, which in the end boiled down to the Bitcoin cash people wanting much larger block sizes. Well, the Bitcoin cashers got their larger block sizes,

went off with their fourth currency, but as often happens, not long after their victory, the fighting among the victors started again. And again, it was over block sizes. One faction wanted what was called Bitcoin ABC, with what are called atomic swaps, which allow for trustlessly trading one cryptocurrency for another, but which do not increase the block size any further.

A different faction wanted to see an increase in the block size parameter from 32 megabytes to 128 megabytes. So now, another fork. There is now Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV. Quoting Bitcoin Magazine, at the time of writing, the Bitcoin Cash ABC chain has more accumulated proof of work, and its native currency, BCH, ABC, is trading higher on futures exchanges. Most Bitcoin Cash ABC proponents, therefore, feel victorious, though many Bitcoin Cash SV proponents

have not yet conceded defeat, end quote. Not yet conceded defeat, huh? That's one way to put it, because members of the Bitcoin Cash SV camp are making public threats of 51% attacks against the ABC coin, among other things. Again, from Bitcoin magazine, quote, N-chain chief scientist and the main man behind Bitcoin SV, Craig Stephen Wright, tweeted that the hash war is a marathon, not a sprint,

implying attacks are still coming. Coin Geek and its owner Calvin Iyer similarly claimed the hash war has only just started. Other Bitcoin Cash SV proponents also anticipate different types of attacks, like a type of spam attack dubbed Satoshi's shotgun. All this will eventually obliterate the Bitcoin Cash ABC chain, they say, end quote. Look, I'm not deep enough into this world to make sense of it.

The last two links in the show notes are for articles summing the story up, so if you're interested, check them out. But again, if you're not into this world, I'm not sure how newsworthy the never-ending internecine warfare in crypto ever, is at the end of the day, but you've got to admit it's entertaining. Quick programming note about this week, everybody. Tomorrow will actually be the last episode this week. We're going to be taking Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off.

It's probably super annoying to any overseas listeners, but yes, it's Thanksgiving here in the U.S., and it's not just that I'll be taking time off to be with my family, but the truth is it's just not going to be a very tech news heavy week because everyone in tech is going to be doing the same. If something earth-shattering does happen, I'll quickly jot off an emergency one to two to five-minute episode. But trust me, barring any emergencies, there won't be enough happening next week to fill a normal episode. Thanksgiving Week is known among the tech meme editors as having the most dull. There are no stories popping shifts in the whole calendar year.

So again, tomorrow will be the only other full episode this week, complete with long read suggestions, but after tomorrow, the pod won't be back until Monday the 26th. Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating and everyone be good in my absence. Talk to you next week.