Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/21 – The Microsoft And Amazon Fall Events

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 Thursday, September 21st, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from the Microsoft fall event, all the headlines from the Amazon fall event,

Starting point is 00:00:45 OpenAI teasing Dolly 3. And one more review of a recent Apple product. And for the first time in a long time, the consensus seems to be it's hot garbage. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's event season in tech. Apple did the iPhone last week. Amazon had their big event today. More on that in a second. YouTube weirdly is doing an event today, and then there's a pixel event.

Starting point is 00:01:14 Is it next week or the beginning of next month? I can't remember. More on all of that when it comes, but first things first, Microsoft's big fall event was this morning. Microsoft announced a unified co-pilot built into Windows 11, launching across all of its apps and services, including Office 365, starting on September 26, quoting Windows Central. Microsoft kicked off its surface and AI event with the announcement of Copilot. While the tech giant has had separate versions of Copilot within specific apps and services, the newly announced Copilot will extend across the company's offerings. Copilot will be available on Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Edge. It will start rolling out on September 26. The upcoming Windows 11-23H2 update focuses largely on

Starting point is 00:02:01 co-pilot. Microsoft showed off several AI features during its presentation, including writing math equations with a stylus directly within a text field, end quote. Microsoft also plans to release 365 copilot AI on November 1st for Microsoft 365 customers on certain business and enterprise plans for $30 per month per user. Quoting the verge, by charging a $30 per month premium per user for access to the feature, this almost doubles the total price of a subscription for businesses on some of the lower-end plans. Copilot is like a modern-day clippy, Sands Anthropower, apomorphic animated paperclip. With it, business users can sum up documents or outsource email

Starting point is 00:02:41 creation to their AI helper. It can also create wholly new word projects using information from other files or offer real-time highlights from Teams meetings. It can even tell you how it did something in Excel after you ask it to visualize data for you or make projections. Co-pilot's debut come shortly after Google released its own AI tools called Duet AI in Google Workspace. It's analog for 365. It's charging the same amount per access, 30, per person per month, and the feature offers many of the same benefits as Microsoft, end quote. Then it was on to the hardware. Microsoft announced the 12.4-inch Surface laptop Go3, offering Intel's 12th-gen-CPUs and Iris G-GPUs, and up to 16 gigabytes of RAM, starting at $799 and shipping October 3rd,

Starting point is 00:03:28 quoting in gadget. Microsoft says it will run for up to 15 hours on a single charge while still being thin and light, 0.62 inches and just shy of 2.5 pounds. The lightweight machine has a 12.4 inch touchscreen with a 3 by 2 ratio, a resolution of 1536 by 1024, and a brightness rating of 320 nits. At first glance, the bezels don't seem to have changed much from previous iterations. Performance-wise, Microsoft claims the Surface laptop Go3 is 88% faster than the original model, which came out three years ago. Inside, it runs a 12th-gen-in Intel Core I-5 CPU along with Intel Iris G graphics. You can configure it with up to 16 gigabytes of LPDR-5 RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage, 512 gigabytes in the commercial version. In addition, there's a 720 p-HD front-facing

Starting point is 00:04:18 camera, a power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, dual far-field studio mics, and Omnasonic speakers with Dolby Audio. As for connectivity, you'll get a USBC 3.2 port that you'll use for display port and fast charging. A USBA 3.1 socket, a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port. There's also Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 support. Unsurprisingly, given Microsoft's focus on AI over the last year, the laptop will embrace co-pilot AI, which the company is baking into Windows 11. The Surface laptop Go3 will be available in four colors, platinum sage, sandstone, and ice blue, and will start at $799. It ships on October 3, end quote. Then there's the 14.4-inch Surface Laptop Studio 2, offering Intel's 13th-gen chips,

Starting point is 00:05:09 Nvidia RTF 40-50, or RTF60, and up to 2 terabytes of storage, starting at $1,999. Quoting the Verge. The Laptop Studio 2 keeps the overall aesthetic of its predecessor, including the pull-forward 14.4-inch display that makes it a much more touch-friendly device, but adds some welcome power user features. The Studio 2, which starts at $1999, runs on Intel's 13th generation chips, specifically the I-7H class, with an Nvidia RTX 4050 or 4060 GPU inside. It also has an Intel Neural Processing Unit or NPU, which is the first Intel NPU in a Windows computer. There were rumblings that Microsoft might be making the chip itself, but it appears not.

Starting point is 00:05:53 You can configure it with up to 2 terabytes of storage and 64 gigs of RAM. And all Microsoft says it's the most powerful surface we've ever built and promises twice the performance of the previous device. The Studio 2 also offers some big new connectivity options. It has two USBC ports, one USBA port, a microSD card reader, and the Surface Slim Pen 2. In addition, there's a new customizable and more responsive haptic touchpad that Microsoft calls the most inclusive touchpad on any laptop. In The Verges review of the original laptop studio, Dan Seafurt praised a lot of the device's

Starting point is 00:06:24 big ideas. It was a great-looking computer that added useful functionality without compromising its essential laptopness. Still, it was lacking on a couple of obvious fronts. It didn't have enough ports. Its performance didn't match its price, and its battery didn't last long enough. Microsoft appears to have gone after these deficiencies head on. Microsoft's hardware future is suddenly in a confusing spot, though, with devices head Panos Panay announcing on Monday that he's leaving the company after nearly two decades. Penae led both Windows and Surface in recent years and was one of the people

Starting point is 00:06:53 pushing the company's vision of multi-use devices the hardest. Penae was supposed to be the star of today's event, but dropped off the program after his departure was announced. Brett Ostrom, the leader of the Surface product team, did the announcements instead. Yusuf Medi, the head of Windows and Service, may have different ideas about where Microsoft should go from here, end quote. Finally, the Surface Go4, quoting the verge. The new GoFour features some minor performance upgrades over its predecessor, but it won't be sold to consumers. The company says it's specifically targeted at businesses and frontline workers. As Win Future leaked last week, the official Surface Go4 specifications reveal that the two-core Intel Pentium processor features

Starting point is 00:07:32 on the Surface Go3 now has been replaced with a new slightly beefier four-core Intel and 200 chip. Microsoft has also ditched the 4-gigabyte RAM configuration that's been available on previous models, which means the Surface Go4 will now only be available with 8 gigabytes of LPDDR5 memory. Even with the Surface Go range primarily targeting the business and education market, that's a welcome change. Considering 4 gigabytes is barely capable of handling everyday multitasking duty these days, storage starts at 64 gigabytes with additional options available for 128 and 256 gigabytes. Microsoft has not provided any pricing for the Surface Go4 or an official release date. It did say in a press release, however, that the device will be, quote,

Starting point is 00:08:14 available exclusively for organizations. We've reached out to Microsoft for a pricing update, and we'll update this story if we hear back, end quote. And Amazon, held an event yesterday. It's kind of interesting. Three years ago, these Amazon events sort of announced everything but the kitchen sink, or probably they did announce an Alexa connected kitchen sink too. You can sort of track Amazon's hardware ambitions with the energy of these events, and yesterday's event was more muted than recent years, but they still threw a lot at us. Amazon unveiled a $180.000 Echo Hub, which is a wall-mountable smart home controller with an 8-inch touchscreen, and Map View, which is an Alexa app interface for the user's home floor plan.

Starting point is 00:09:05 They refresh their Alexa-powered Echo Frames glasses with enhanced speech processing, better noise isolation, making them 15% thinner, and claiming a six-hour battery life all for 270 bucks. They also refresh their $150 Echo Show 8 with a new design, a centered camera, a smart home hub, spatial audio, and a home screen that changes based on user proximity. They announced the $50 Fire TV Stick 4K, the $60 Fire TV Stick 4K max, the $120-24-inch Fire TV soundbar, and Generative AI updates for Fire TV voice search. Speaking of AI, they also highlighted new Generative AI features aimed at making Alexa more conversational and personalized, available as a free preview right now on all echo devices

Starting point is 00:09:55 in the U.S. Quoting TechCrunch. Our latest model has been specifically optimized for voice and the things we know our customers love, like having access to real-time information, efficiently controlling their smart home and getting the most out of their home entertainment, Dave Limp, the SVP of devices and services at Amazon said on stage. Amazon says that the new model will power more conversational experiences, experiences that take into account bodyline, as well as a person's eye contact and gestures. It'll interact with APIs to enable new smart home capabilities inferring the meaning of descriptions like spooky lighting, and it'll give Alexa a bigger and more opinionated personality. The capabilities deliver unique experiences based on the

Starting point is 00:10:35 preferences that you've shared, the services that you've interacted with, and the information about the environment in and around your home, Limp said. This new model will allow you to surface personal reminders. For example, it can help you with recently played music or even come up with recipe recommendations based on your grocery purchases, end quote. During a demo, Limp asks an Alexa device connected to the new generative AI model, what's your favorite sports team? After a brief hiccup with the event Wi-Fi, Alexa responded to that and follow-up questions about Seahawks, stats, and game times, even after Limp paused to address the audience and then returned to the conversation with Alexa. Limp didn't cover it during the demo, but the new generative

Starting point is 00:11:15 AI model can also adjust its tone and responses to express things like affirmation, excitement, laughter, and surprise, Amazon says, adjusting to a person's natural pauses and hesitation to deliver an ostensibly more free-flowing conversation, end quote. But speaking of generative AI, OpenAI has teased Dahl E3, which can be summoned and controlled using chat GPT. Also announced plans to make the tool available to chat GPT Plus and enterprise customers, as soon as October. Quoting the verge. Dolly converts text prompts to images, but even Dolly 2 got things wrong, often ignoring specific wording. The latest version, OpenAI researchers said, understands context much better. A new feature of Dolly 3 is integration with chat GPT. By using chat GPT,

Starting point is 00:12:09 someone doesn't have to come up with their own detailed prompt to guide Dolly 3. They can just ask chat GPT to come up with a prompt, and the chatbot will write out a paragraph. Dolly works better with longer sentences for Dolly 3 to follow. Other users can still use their own prompts if they have specific ideas for Dolly. In a demo to the verge, Adidia Ramesh, lead researcher and head of the Dolly team, prompted ChatGPT to help him come up with a logo for a ramen restaurant in the mountains. ChatGPT then wrote a longer prompt, and Dali came up with four options. My favorite was a rendering of a mountain with ramen snowcaps, broth flowing down like a waterfall, and pickled eggs on the ground like garden stones, although it looked more like an illustration

Starting point is 00:12:52 for some nice merch than a conventional restaurant logo. This connection with the chatbot, OpenAI said, allows more people to create AI art because they don't have to be very good at coming up with a prompt. Dali, first released in January 2021, came before other text to image generative AI art platforms by Stability AI and Mid Journey. But by the time Dali 2 was released in 2022, OpenAI opened a waitlist to control who got to use the platform after criticism that Dolly could generate photorealistic explicit images and showed bias when generating photos. The company removed the waitlist in September last year and opened Dolly 2 to the public. This new version of Dolly will be first released to ChatGBTGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise users in October, followed by

Starting point is 00:13:34 Research Labs and its API service in the fall. OpenAI plans to stagger the release of Dolly 3, but did not commit to when a free public version will be released. end quote. I'm going to squeeze in one more Apple review here, not a typical review, and also not typical because it's not good. I don't know if we spoke much about it, but at the last iPhone event, Apple made a big deal about finally dropping leather from its products, especially its phone cases, to be replaced with what it called fine woven. Well, lots of people are saying, this is a big miss. Quoting the verge, folks, what you've heard so far is true. Apple's new fine-woven iPhone cases and accessories are bad, like really bad. I've been puzzling over them for the

Starting point is 00:14:24 past week, looking at them from different angles, picking them up, setting them down, petting them. Seven days later, I still can't make sense of them and have no other choice but to say it out loud. Find-woven is very bad. Find-woven is a new fabric option you'll find on iPhone 15 cases, air tag holders, and magsafe wallets. Apple calls it a luxurious and durable micro-twill. It's silky, almost slippery to the touch, and cost. cost $59 for any of the phone cases, $35 for an air tag holder, and $99 for one of the new watchbands. Not the most expensive phone cases you can buy, but pretty darn pricey. Apple is pitching them as a premium replacement of sorts for the leather accessories,

Starting point is 00:15:03 it discontinued. The company won't sell leather iPhone cases and straps anymore because making them at Apple's scale, quote, has a significant carbon footprint. According to Lisa Jackson, the company's Environmental Policy VP. But fine woven is very much not the premium material that leather is. When I popped the MagSafe wallet out of its box, I could clearly see some places where it was already showing where along the edges. Little bits of lint immediately caught on the fabric, too, and there's the fingernail test. If I'm putting one of these cases on my phone, I'm inevitably going to scratch it on accident with a jagged fingernail edge, or it's going to come into contact with my car keys.

Starting point is 00:15:39 And when you scratch fine-woven, the results are seemingly permanent. When we first inspected the cases after picking them up at Apple Park, Verge, Editor-in-Chief Neelie, Patel picked one up and ran his fingernails across it five times, and that was all it took to leave a trail of indelible scuffs on the fabric. The scratches are still there a week later, no matter how many times I've tried buffing it out by rubbing my finger over it. I'm trying to imagine what this case would be like after a year of being subjected to the dust and lint at the bottom of my purse or the stray scratches from nails and keys. God help me if my toddler ever managed to put his grubby hands on it, which he absolutely would. I just don't see any way that this material ages gracefully. The leather cases had their problems,

Starting point is 00:16:24 but when leather gets old, it at least looks nice. A scuffed, dusty fabric case will not, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/21 – The Microsoft And Amazon Fall Events

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