Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 8/27 - The Three New iPhones to Expect Next Month

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

The three new iPhones Mark Gurman says are coming our way, Warren Buffet invests in an Indian tech company, Palmer Luckey pans Magic Leap and why Uber thinks e-scooters are cool. Links:Apple to Embrace iPhone X Design With New Colors, Bigger Screens (Bloomberg)Berkshire Hathaway in talks for a stake in Paytm (Economic Times)Microsoft Announces Xbox All Access (Thurrott.com)Public Bravado, Private Doubts: Inside the Unraveling of Elon Musk’s Tesla Buyout (WSJ)Why Elon Musk Reversed Course on Taking Tesla Private (NYTimes)Epic's first Fortnite Installer allowed hackers to download and install anything on your Android phone silently (Android Central)Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap (PalmerLuckey.com)Uber plans shift from cars to bikes for shorter trips (The Financial Times) 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 from Monday, August 27th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. The three new iPhones that Mark German says are coming our way.

Warren Buffett invests in an Indian tech company. Palmer Lucky Pans Magic Leap. And why Uber thinks e-scooters are cool. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Ah, it's Mark German Apple Scoop Monday, and this time I didn't miss it. According to German and Debbie Wu's usually reliable sourcing, new 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch OLED iPhones are coming in September. They will be joined by a lower cost 6.1-inch LCD iPhone, but all of the new iPhones will get speed and camera improvements, and all will incorporate the full-screen design of the iPhone tens.

So while there will be a new range of sizes and possibly colors of this year's iPhone upgrades, you should think of this year's update cycle as more of an S cycle, where the iPhones will look essentially the same as last year, but with updated internals. Quote, there will be a new high-end iPhone internally dubbed D33 with a display that measures about 6.5 inch diagonally, according to the people familiar with the matter. That would make it the largest iPhone by far in one of the biggest mainst, on the market. It will continue to have a glass back with stainless steel edges and dual cameras on the back. The big difference on the software side will be the ability to view content side by

side in apps like mail and calendar. It will be Apple's second phone with a CRISPR, organic, light-emitting diode or OLED screen, end quote. The 6.1-inch LCD version will apparently have aluminum sides for the purposes of cost reduction, and the expected updates to Air pods, Apple Watch, and iPad Pros are coming next month, according to German as well. Quote, the watches will look similar to current models, but will include larger screens that go nearly edge to edge. Their overall size will remain similar, making them compatible with existing straps. People familiar with the product said, the new iPad Pros will come in sizes around 11 inches and 12.9 inches and include slimmer bezels. They'll remove the home button and fingerprint

sensing in lieu of an iPhone 10-like gesture interface and face ID for unlocking the tablet, people familiar with the plans said, end quote. But like a dagger to my heart, German says that the iPod Mini will not be updated. In that same report on the iPhones, German casually mentioned as well, the rumor that has basically become an open secret at this point that Google is planning to launch the Pixel 3 phones at an event in New York City in early October. German specifically mentions October 9, though others have previously mentioned October 4th. Whenever Warren Buffett makes an investment in a technology company, it's news. Because for one thing, Buffett tends to shy away from tech companies, all things being equal.

And two, because Buffett is a value investor. So when he sees an opportunity in tech companies, which are usually so wildly growth-valued, it tends to be a rare thing. So the news out of India's economic times that Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has taken a 3 to 4% stake in Paytm's parent company 197 communications raised quite a few eyebrows. This would be the first investment by Buffett, who until a few years ago stayed away from even listed technology companies. In a previously held company that still incurs heavy losses, underlining the potential he sees in India's technology market. There was no response to queries emailed to Berkshire Hathaway, including CFO Mark Hamburg, and to Paytm. What is Paytm? It is India's largest digital wallet and payment service with 230 million registered users.

Let me quote from Wikipedia here, of all places, quote, paytm is available in 10 Indian languages and offers online use cases like mobile recharges, utility bill payments, travel, movies, and events bookings, as well as in-store payments at grocery stores, fruit and vegetable shops, restaurants, parking, tolls, pharmacies, and education institutions with the PayTM QR code, end quote. Back to quoting from the Economic Times. Paytm was valued at around $7 billion last year when it raised $1 billion from the SoftBank Vision Fund and valued at around $10 billion earlier this year, a secondary share sale by employees of the company, end quote. Remember that story from last week about Microsoft offering a subscription service that included an actual console as well? Well, today it became official.

It's called Xbox All Access, as Microsoft's Bogdan Bilan explained to Therat.com, quote, for no upfront cost and one low monthly price for 24 months, Xbox All Access gets you a new Xbox 1S or Xbox 1X, access to more than 100 great games through Xbox GamePass, and online multiplayer with Xbox Live Gold. That's more than 100 all-you-can-play games, including highly anticipated new Xbox-1 exclusives, the day they're released,

plus more games added all the time on the fastest, most reliable gaming network, and an Xbox-1 console, end quote. As rumored, this is not, not a lease. After the two-year term is up, you own the console, lock, stock, and barrel. Therot calculates that this deal could save gamers about $130 over the life of the subscription. So, gaming as a service indeed. Shout out to the 10-year-old listener out there, whose dad reported to me over the weekend. He learned about recurring revenue by listening to this very story

on the show last week. Thank you for your fine taste in podcast. You're a young sir. Both of these stories are from the weekend, so they're a little stale, but they are follow-ups to stories we've been following for a while, so I didn't want to just leave the narrative thread dangling on you. First, remember that whole taking Tesla private thing? In a blog post late Friday night, Elon Musk was all JK, JK, in a board meeting this week where bankers were presenting plans to structure a go-private deal. Musk told the board that he had come to believe that Tesla should now remain a public company after all, and the board has apparently agreed with him. In the show notes, there are two stories that give you the minute-by-minute breakdown of how all this took place.

The Wall Street Journal one is especially detailed, I think, but TLDR. Turns out the Saudis maybe weren't 100% on board after all, and Musk's somewhat erratic behavior might have been a factor. in that. And then there was the fact that the Saudis would want Tesla to do things like open manufacturing facilities in Saudi Arabia, and Musk is proud that Tesla's are made in America. And then there was the weird optics of Elon Musk seemingly being on this crusade to wean the world off of oil, only to potentially get in bed with the biggest petro state in the world, something that a lot of people pointed out to Musk as being a tad weird. But the biggest

problem was the fact that some of Tesla's biggest institutional investors, firms like Tiro Price and Fidelity, would be unable to participate in any going private deal as they are unable to invest in private companies. So other investors would need to be found. And indeed, they were found, apparently. Several automakers wanted to participate in any take private scheme. But Musk seemingly blanched at that idea because he didn't want to get in bed with the incumbents he so. He's so badly wants to unseat in the automobile industry. So it all came down to if Tesla went private, Musk could escape the public market scrutiny and the short sellers he so despises, but to do so, he would likely have had to have bring on board some people who would want a bigger say in what

Tesla was doing going forward, and essentially people that Musk has looked at as his main competition. So ironically, if going public was a Hail Mary pass to retain the sort of control Musk craves, it seems that he has come to the conclusion that staying public will actually give him a better chance to stay the course. So all that brouhaha for nothing. And remember how Fortnite has avoided the Google Play App Store, avoided the App Store tax, by instead offering users the ability to sidelode the games onto their own devices.

Well, one of the arguments that app stores make for their utility is the fact that they can offer greater security to users. Lots of security experts warned that side loaders could open up a potential Pandora's box of hacking. I read some of those tweets at the time, I believe. And well, it happened. Google disclosed over the weekend that it had discovered an extremely serious vulnerability in Epic's Fortnite installer for Android on the Galaxy App Store that would essentially let any app hijack the game download process

during installation to install, well, basically anything a hacker wanted to install on a user's phone, and the user would have no idea that it happened. The vulnerability has apparently since been patched, but if you installed Fortnite on your Samsung phone over the previous few weeks, quote, users simply need to update the installer, which is a one-tap affair. The Fortnite installer that brought the fix is version 2.1.0. which you can check for by launching the Fortnite installer and going to its settings. If you, for whatever reason, were to download an earlier version of Fortnite installer,

it will prompt you to install 2.1.0 or later before installing Fortnite. The Magic Leap AR headset has been out for several weeks now. There have been mixed reviews and tear downs, the whole nine yards. One very prominent reviewer has a review out this morning, and it's fairly savage. however. Palmer Lucky is the founder of Oculus, and he posted his impressions of Magic Leap on his personal blog under the title, Magic Leap is a tragic heap. I'll allow Palmer to explain in his own words, quote, the title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the virtual reality continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their

current offering is a tragedy in the classical sense. even more so when you consider how their massive funding and carefully crafted hype sucked all the air out of the room in the AR space. It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality. It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community, end quote.

The piece has a fairly detailed and fairly technical take-down of, the Magic Leap technology itself. Let me jump to the conclusion, quote, Magic Leap needed to really blow people away to justify the last few years. The product they put out is reasonably solid but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications. That is not good for the XR industry. It is slightly better than HoloLens in some ways, slightly worse than others,

and generally a small step past what was state-of-the-art three years ago. This is more HoloLens 1.1 than Consumer AR 1.0. Consumer AR can't happen without advancements, and it seems those advancements will be coming from other companies. There is, of course, a chance that Magic Leap is sandbagging us. Maybe the real deal is just behind the next curtain. Past experience suggests otherwise. Finally, today, the Financial Times has an interview with Uber CEO, Dara Kosra Shoshai.

where he gives voice to the strategy that Uber has clearly committed to since Koswashahi himself took the reins of the company. For shorter trips, things like bikes, e- scooters, and other modes of transportation just make more sense than cars. Uber wants to be your one-stop solution for transportation, and so Koswra Shahi felt like Uber had to own this vector in the market rather than seat it to other players. And Uber intends to follow through on this, even though, it takes the company outside its core competency of ride hails. Quote, during rush hour, it is very inefficient for a one-ton hulk of metal to take one-person, 10 blocks. We're able to shape behavior in a way, and that's a win for the user. It's a win for the city.

Short-term financially, maybe it's not a win for us, but strategically long-term, we think that it is exactly where we want to head, end quote. If you'll recall Uber added e-bikes to its app in February, acquired bike share, company Jump in April and has struck deals with various e-scooter companies, including Lyme, among others. Kosworshahi admits that Uber makes less money from these car alternatives, and then there's the fact that Uber drivers are cut out of this deal as well, but Kosrushahi is willing to take that risk.

Quote, we are willing to trade off short-term per-unit economics for a longer-term higher engagement. I've found in my career that engagement over-the-long-term wins wars, and sometimes it's worth it to lose battles in order to win wars. Hey guys, I want to run an experiment if you'll help me out. We've got two open ad slots this week and three open in the month of September. I love all of our sponsors, of course, but I wanted to see if maybe we could do something a little different and open up these particular ad slots to a different kind of sponsor.

Are you a developer of anything? An app, a service, even a game, or something like that. You could be a solo dev, maybe especially if you're a solo dev or a small team, a small company, but big company, too, doesn't matter. If you were interested in snapping up one of these unsold ad slots, get in touch at the email address, podcast at techmeem.com. For less than $500, you can get your little project in front of just under 20,000 super engaged tech-focused podcast listeners every day. what I'm thinking of is do you have a product or project the size of which maybe you would promote on product hunt? That's sort of what I'm interested in finding out. I want to learn if there's any value to small or medium-sized projects advertising on the pod.

If not, no big deal. We have great sponsors, as I say, and they seem happy with us because they keep re-upping. And if we don't sell our ad slots in a day like today, it's no big deal, that's cool. but I'm actually genuinely interested to see if this podcast could also become a platform for new and maybe indie or upcoming products and projects, the sort of projects that you see promoted on product hunt. If we could become a platform for indie devs as well as established companies, I just think that would be cool. So if you want to experiment with me and you have any sort of promo budget at all, as I said, it's affordable. Get in touch. Podcast at TechMeme.com.

Talk to you tomorrow.