Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, May 7, 2018 - The iMac at Twenty

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

Highlights from Microsoft's Build conference, a preview of Google's I/O conference, you might soon be able to add music to your Instagram Stories, who's ahead in the autonomous car race, and the iMac at twenty. Stories from: @backlon, @nickstatt Links:Nadella's Microsoft (The Verge)Eight things to expect at Google I/O 2018 (The Verge)Who’s Winning the Self-Driving Car Race? (Bloomberg)Why 'Stories' Took Over Your Smartphone (The Atlantic) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, May 7th, 2018. Today, highlights from Microsoft's Build Conference, a preview of Google's I.O. conference. You might soon be able to add music to your Instagram stories, who's ahead in the autonomous car race, and celebrating the IMac at 20.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Microsoft's Build Developers Conference kicked off today, and the company started by announcing there are now more. than 700 million devices running Windows 10 worldwide, up from 500 million this time last year. And its Office 365 service now has 135 million monthly active users up from 120 million just this past October. The first big consumer announcement was a new Your Phone app for Windows 10, which will let you access your phone's content like text messages, photos, and notifications, right on your Windows 10 desktop. The app is coming soon to Windows Insiders first.

And from there, they came fast and furious, showing off its prowess in Edge computing and Internet of Things. Microsoft said it is open sourcing its Azure IoT Edge runtime, unveiled a new speech devices SDK, and said it's bringing its custom vision service to Azure IoT Edge, so that drones and industrial machinery can perform vision-related tasks independently from the cloud. They're working with drone maker DJI to bring an SDK to Windows 10 PCs. New HoloLens enterprise apps were announced including remote assist for hands-free telepresence and layout for designing 3D spaces in augmented reality. A new project Connect for Azure was announced to help developers offer features

like hand tracking, high fidelity spatial mapping, and more in their projects. So the connect might be dead on the Xbox, but it lives on, hopefully, in other applications. To tie in with all of these announcements, Microsoft CEO Sasha Nadella sat down with Dieter Bonn at the verge, to talk about everything from GDPR to Microsoft-driven multi-device experiences, to the guiding principles of ethics in technology. Quoting from the interview, Nadella said, We built operating systems all our life, but what is an operating system?

In a world where every person is going to use multiple devices in their life, they're going to collaborate with many people in their family or at work. Take the latest update to Windows we just did. It's all about being able to recognize that every Windows user also happens to have a phone as well. So that means they already have multiple devices. They have a Windows device and perhaps a non-Windows device. How do we make sure that both these devices can work in concert

to help the user get the most out of their computers? Google's developer conference, I.O. begins tomorrow. What can we expect from that one? Over at the verge, Nick Statt has a rundown. Of course, pride of place will be given to the latest version of Android, which is Android P. Statt says to expect significant changes to the interface design. A new developer preview is expected to drop tomorrow, so we'll have much more details soon. And what's the big play that everyone is making these days?

Smart Assistant. home smart speakers and smart devices to interact with those assistants, so expect to hear new features for Google Assistant and perhaps some new Google Home integrations. But Stats says not to expect hardware announcements, as those will probably come later in the year. Probably less will be said about wearables in general, though last week Google did announce that Google Assistant

was coming to its WearOS platform. And in terms of design, a refresh to Google's famous material, material design is widely expected. And of course, we've been seeing redesigns for Gmail, Google News, etc., so that could all tie into updates to Google Photos and Google Play as well. There have been plenty of rumors of a new standalone Google News mobile app. Games will also be a focus, possibly including a new streaming gaming service, and possibly some mobile gaming devices that have long been rumored.

And everyone is obsessed with touting their AI initiatives. as we saw at Facebook's F8, so expect to hear about applications around Google's TensorFlow platform. Late last week, a transparency report was issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that there was a large jump in the collection of metadata

by the National Security Agency last year. In fact, data collection was up over three times from the previous year, 2016. Two years ago, 151 million call records were collected, but last year, 2017, 530 million were hoovered up. And this all comes after a 2015 law was passed that was supposed to curtail metadata collection generally, and despite the fact that the NSA is seemingly going after fewer targets. The number of warrantless Section 702 content queries involving U.S. citizens jumped from 5,288 to 7,512, but the number of pin register and trace

and tap orders was only 33, down from 135 in the peak year of 2014. And the number of people targeted in call detail record requests fell from 42 to 40. Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told Reuters that the government has, quote, not altered the manner in which it uses its authority to obtain call detail records. We expect this number to fluctuate from year to year. Is Instagram about to let you add music to your stories? TechCrunch was tipped off by a reader that hidden in the code of its Android app.

There are references to music stickers, which seem like they could allow users to search for songs produced by professional artists to add to their Instagram stories. Facebook has been negotiating for years with the record companies, and as TechCrunch's Josh Konstine points out, most people assumed they simply wanted to launch a Spotify competitor. But if Facebook has succeeded in licensing content from record labels for Instagram, then maybe you can turn your stories into DIY Drake music videos. This obviously continues a theme from last week when we spoke several times about how stories are eating the internet. In that vein, I also wanted to point you to a story in the Atlantic from Ian Bogost entitled,

Why Stories Took Took Over Your Smart Phone. He says that stories are the first native media format of the smartphone era. In an era where the device you consume your media on is the device you also produce your media on, Bogos thinks stories make much more sense than feeds. For 25 years after the web commercialized, the things people made online for home pages, blogs, and eventually social media sites, happened separately from the devices used to view and interact with that material after publication. A photograph would have to be scanned and uploaded, for example.

text too would have to be authored somewhere else then uploaded or emailed. But since 2007, people have been filtering their lives through the window of their smartphone. That name is vestigial now, because it's only incidental that an iPhone or a pixel is a telephone. Instead, it's a frame that surrounds everything that is possible and knowable. As always, there's a link to the story in the show notes. Bloomberg has a great piece up with the self-explanatory title, who's winning the self-driving car race, where they essentially handicap all the players in the driverless car game.

The consensus leader, according to Bloomberg, Alphabet's Waymo Division. But that's just the leader in technology. Who might be the company closest to getting consumer driverless cars into production? GM. Quoting from the piece, Waymo has developed a phenomenal system and is ahead of the pack. That's from Brian Cooley. head of Boston Consulting Group's U.S. Automotive Division.

He told Bloomberg, quote, but that's very different from being able to manufacture an autonomous vehicle. You have to look at GM. In Europe, Daimler is leading the pack, end quote. Bloomberg lists Waymo as the company with the most experience and the best technology because they've tallied up 5 million road miles and billions of computer simulated miles. Waymo also has the lowest rate of disengagement,

the times a human monitor actually has to, intervene and grab the wheel, and it also has the least accidents reported last year per miles driven. Waymo only had three collisions over 350,000 miles. Bloomberg says GM is a contender because it has a factory in place that is ready to churn out self-driving bolts. But it does note that GM's numbers of accidents per miles driven were quite high last year. Among the players that Bloomberg lists as remaining close to the leaders, Mercedes-Benz, Aptive, Nissan, Audi, and Zooks. It lists as followers to the pack, BMW, Toyota, Ford, Volvo, and Hyundai, and bringing up the rear, Uber and Tesla. If you want to read Bloomberg's detailed rationale for the rankings

and the general horse race pick for all these self-driving competitors, I've linked to the piece in the show notes. Finally today, yesterday, Sunday, was the 20th anniversary of the IMAQ, which was announced on May 6, 1998. The amount of ways this computer was historic are numerous, of course. It was the first major Apple product announced after Steve Jobs returned to the company. In fact, at the time of the announcement, he was still interim CEO. It was Johnny Ives' first major design home run, though it should be noted it was not the first Apple product he worked on. That was the second-generation Newton message pad.

The IMAQ was also the product that saved Apple from imminent danger of bankruptcy, the first sales hit that the company had seen in many years. The IMAQ was the best-selling computer of the 1998 holiday season, and Apple's stock went up more than 300% between the IMAX announcement and early 2000. But more importantly, it was the first product in what would become a long line of products that thrust Apple back to the forefront of computing, design, and frankly, the world's zeitgeist. The first iMac was priced at $1,299, had a G3, 233 megahertz processor, a 4-gabyte hard drive, and a 15-inch CRT display, but of course, nothing else.

It was an all-in-one device, and it had that beautiful, colorful, translucent backing. We can go into all the ways that the design of the thing set the template for Apple and, frankly, the whole world going into the new millennium. But the IMAX's most important legacy is truly the fact that its success allowed Apple to even survive into the new millennium. The theme of the event announcing the IMAC

was back on track. Apple clearly knew what the stakes were. That they succeeded with the IMAC seemed like a miracle then and, frankly, a little bit today. Let me quote from Horace Debutz piece this weekend, quote, Sales of Macs, which were at the time the only source of revenue for Apple, increased from $2.7 million to $3.8 million a year. This at a time when Windows PCs were shipping about 100 million units.

That was enough to ensure survival. In retrospect, you have to wonder if Apple, with the IMAC, was lucky to survive into this next era, or if that era would have ever happened without the IMAC, end quote. But as Horace and many others have pointed out, the iMac was also significant for the way that Apple zigged while the rest of the industry was zagging. At the time, the Wintel paradigm seemed completely dominant, and its dominance was predicated on the corporate world. People at the time thought you could sell millions of units a year to consumers and have a nice comfortable niche,

but if you wanted to sell hundreds of millions of units, you really had to court the CTOs of the world. But Apple was clearly positioning the iMac as a consumer device, and not just because of the way it looked. Remember, it was called iMac, so a personal device, an I device, but also I stood for internet, an internet computer. Steve Jobs had wanted to call the computer MacMan, but thanks to a brainstorm from an ad executive, the I prefix was adopted, thus be getting iPods and iTunes and iPhone and iPads, etc. This was part of it. of Apple's famous digital hub strategy, of course. This was the era of Napster. IMAX would not only sport optical drives, but eventually rewritable CD-ROMs, leading to the famous Rip Mix Burn campaign.

And IMAX would go a long way to popularizing the USB standard, leading as a part of the digital hub campaign to the universe of gadgets that, at least for the first half of the aughts, would all need computers as a sort of mothership to manage. As for the design, as we was common. When Johnny Ive first presented the egg-shape design of the first IMAQ to Jobs, he rejected it. But as he also often did, jobs eventually came around and began touting the design to all who would listen. Translucency had been creeping into Apple products for a couple of years, but it helped the computer stand out, certainly, as well as make them friendly and personal, a hallmark of all of Apple's products for the last 20 years. Even the handle on the back,

which was ostensibly so you could easily move the computer from desk to desk. To Ives' mind, the handle was all about making the computer feel accessible. Quote, Back then people weren't comfortable with technology, Ive has said. If you're scared of something, then you won't touch it. So I thought if there's this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It's approachable. It's intuitive.

It gives you permission to touch, end quote. Real quickly, one other way the IMAC led to modern Apple As we know it, to market the device, Apple cut a special deal with Comp USA to showcase the computers in special stores within a store at Comp USA outlets. But Apple was severely disappointed with the disinterested and uninformed ways Comp USA employees sold the computers to consumers. And so exactly three years later, the first Apple store opened in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Let me close by quoting again from Horace Dedu to point out that if you don't have to be a lot of, have the original iMac, you certainly don't have all of the subsequent devices that completely upended the entire industry and the world, mainly because you might not even have an Apple.

Quote, the iMac enabled at least a trillion dollars of value to be created and made Apple the biggest company in the world. That's all for today, everybody. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And I'm sorry I've been nursing a bit of a cold today. It's all in my throat. I've been popping cough drops and drinking warm tea.

Hopefully the raspyness wasn't too distracting. I'll talk to you again tomorrow.