Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/23 – USB-C For Everybody! (Maybe By Law…)

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

We all sort of want the gadget world to move to USB-C, right? But do we want that to be government mandated? Very interesting executive departure from Facebook. Apple is telling leakers they don’t belong in Cupertino. Apple is still telling Fortnite to talk to the hand. And an interesting AR raise. Sponsors: UrbanCatalyst.com/techmeme Blockchain.com Links: One to charge them all: EU demands single plug for phones (AP) Facebook Chief Technology Officer Schroepfer to Step Down (Bloomberg) Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo (The Verge) Apple won’t let Fortnite back on iOS until the Epic v. Apple verdict is final (The Verge) iPhone 13 and Apple Silicon (CreativeStrategies.com) YouTube gets official video downloads on the web, saving you from using some very sketchy sites (Android Police) Softorino YouTube Converter Chinese augmented reality glasses maker Nreal valued at $700 million after fresh funding (CNBC) 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 for Thursday, September 23rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, we all sort of want the gadget world to move to USBC, right? But do we want that to be government mandated? Very interesting executive departure from Facebook. Apple is telling leakers they don't belong in Cupertino. Apple is still telling Fortnite to talk to the hand and an interesting ARAs. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The European Commission has proposed legislation mandating USB charging for mobile devices, citing electronic waste issues as a reason why. Apple, of course, is the main holdout from using USBC, but more on that in a second, quoting the Associated Press.

The European Commission, the Block's executive arm, proposed legislation that would mandate USBC cables for charging, technology that many device makers have already adopted. The push by the EU will certainly be cheered by the millions of people who have rummaged through a drawer full of cables for the right charger, but the EU also wants to cut down on the 11,000 metric tons of electronic waste thrown out every year by Europeans. The Commission said the typical person living in the EU owns at least three chargers and used two regularly, but 38% of people report not being able to charge their phones at least once because they couldn't find a compatible charger. Some 420 million mobile phones or portable electronic devices were sold in the EU last year. The new rules also call for standardizing

fast-charging technology and giving consumers the right to choose whether to buy new devices with or without a charger, which the EU estimates will save consumers 250 million euros or $293 million a year. Companies will get two years to adapt to the new rules once they take effect. The rules would apply only to electronics sold in the European single markets 30 countries, but like the EU's strict privacy regulations, they could end up becoming a de facto standard for the rest of the world. Apple said it shared the European Commission's commitment to protecting the environment, but question whether the proposals would help consumers. Quote, we remain concerned that strict regulation mandating just one type of connector stifles innovation

rather than encouraging it, which in turn will harm consumers in Europe and around the world, the company said in a statement, end quote. Now, as a lot of people have been speculating about online overnight, maybe Apple will use this as the impetus to go fully portless, not having a charger on your phone at all and making the iPhone of the future be 100% wireless charging. Although remember, wireless charging has environmental and energy efficiency issues of its own. Facebook's CTO, Mike Schreffer, says he will step down next year and shift into a part-time advisory role. Andrew Bosworth will become Facebook's new chief technology officer, quoting Bloomberg.

Shrefer's move marks the most significant departure from the company in years and follows the recent exits of several other top executives. Shreper, 46, will continue to advise the company in a new part-time senior fellow role, helping with recruiting technical talent and developing the company's artificial intelligence initiatives. Known as Shrepfer joined Facebook in 2008 and has been CTO since 2013 reporting to Zuckerberg himself. He sits atop many of Facebook's most ambitious organizations, including groups that the social network is depending on for future growth, such as engineering, infrastructure, augmented reality, and VR, and the blockchain and finance unit. His desk sits next to Zuckerberg's and operating chief Cheryl Sandberg's at Facebook

headquarters. Shephyr's most central role may be his oversight of Facebook's AI organization, which he helped build. That group develops the technology Facebook uses to automatically find and remove content that violates its policies like nudity, hate speech, and graphic violence. Pressure to improve those systems increased last week following a series of reports in the Wall Street Journal that found evidence describing the company's struggles to reckon with issues like COVID-19 misinformation and human trafficking, end quote. Yes, folks are speculating because of the timing of this, if this is related to those recent Wall Street Journal stories and the scandal surrounding them, especially because from what I hear, Shrepp only informed

his colleagues about this on Monday. So is this what I speculated on earlier? Are folks who were staying at Facebook to fight the good fight getting frustrated? Remember, I said some folks probably endured Facebook scandals and the raised eyebrows of their friends and family over the years because they believed social media was still young and so could be fixed, and they wanted to be the ones to fix that problem. I don't know if this is that, but here is what Samid Chakhtra-Bardi, Facebook's ex-Civic Integrity Lead tweeted, quote, After I left Facebook earlier this month, many existing employees asked me who could now best be their ally on matters of societal import. Who was on my short list every single time?

Shrep. So this is indeed significant, end quote. But let me throw one more angle of speculation at you. Andrew Bosworth, or Boz, as he has known, is taking over the CTO role, and he is known to be perhaps Mark Zuckerberg's most loyal confidant in the company and fiercely defensive of the company. So making Boz-Zuck's effective operational number two, especially on the product and tech side of Facebook's most important initiatives, some folks have been saying, might that be a sign that Zuckerberg is moving to a war footing? Apple has apparently gone on a war footing when it comes to internal employee leaks to the media. According to a leaked email, Tim Cook told Apple staffers that recent leakers of info about Apple products and internal meetings, quote, do not belong here, end quote, and the company is tracking them down.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of us learning about that from a leak, quoting the verge. On September 17th, Tim Cook announced during an internal company-wide meeting that Apple would be requiring frequent testing for unvaccinated employees, but was stopping short of a vaccine mandate. He also said that he was, quote, looking forward to moving forward after the Epic versus Apple antitrust case shortly after the meeting, both pieces of news leaked to the verge. Now, Cook is tying the news to product leaks, which the company has historically gone to great lengths to track down, quoting from Cook's leaked email. I'm writing today because I've heard from so many of you that were incredibly frustrated to see the contents of the meeting leaked to reporters. This comes after a

product launch in which most of the details of our announcements were also leaked to the press. I want you to know that I share your frustration. These opportunities to connect as a team are really important, but they only work if we can trust that the content will stay within Apple. I want to reassure you that we are doing everything in our power to identify those who leaked. As you know, we do not tolerate disclosures of confidential information, whether it's product IP or the details of a confidential meeting. We know that the leakers constitute a small number of people, we also know that people who leak confidential information do not belong here, end quote. As Chris Haride tweeted, quote, if I were Apple, a slightly different, unique version of this

internal email went out to each recipient. Be careful, folks, end quote, yes, or watermarks. I always assumed everything Apple did had digital watermarks all over them. And if they didn't before, maybe they will do now. Meanwhile, Tim Sweeney says Apple has told Epic that it will not consider reinstating Epic's developer account until all legal appeals have been concluded, which is not likely anytime soon, likely years from now. So maybe don't expect Fortnite to return to iOS anytime soon, quoting the verge. The emails published on Wednesday, both on Twitter and an epic blog post, indicate Epic Games's various apps are unlikely to return to the app store for the foreseeable future. One letter published by Sweeney dated September 21st and sent by lawyers representing Apple,

informs the company that Apple will not reinstate Epic's developer account until the appeals have been resolved, a process that could take years. Quote, Apple has exercised its discretion not to reinstate Epic's developer program account at this time, the email reads. Furthermore, Apple will not consider any further requests for reinstatement until the district court's judgment becomes final and non-appealable, end quote. The message accurately notes that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers, the judge in Epic v. Apple concluded Apple is within its rights to terminate any Epic-related accounts it desires from the App Store. Epic has already paid financial damages for breaching its contract. Writing on Twitter, Sweeney framed Apple's refusal as a betrayal of its earlier pledge to reinstate Epic

games once the company assented to follow the App Store guidelines. Quote, Apple lied, Sweeney wrote, Apple spent a year telling the world the court and the press, they'd welcome Epic's return to the app store if they agreed to play by the same rules as everyone else. Epic agreed, and now Apple has reneged in another abuse of its monopoly power over a billion users, end quote. Apple declined to comment on Sweeney's tweets, but did not dispute the authenticity of the documents, end quote. More on the whole, Apple Silicon improvements from generation to generation debate. An analysis by Ben Badgeron says that Apple Silicon's GPU performance gains have averaged 19% year-over-year over the past five years, but the A-15 bionic jumped a whopping 52%.

quote, while it isn't always obvious, Apple's integrated product design approach of hardware software and silicon has led to many of the advances in camera, battery life, AI, video capture performance, and even Pro Motion on iPhone 13 Pro. Apple has a luxury other silicon companies don't. They custom-tune their architecture and silicon design specifically for iPhone and the feature they want iPhone to have. This allows them to spend their transistor budget on features instead of just pure performance. But even then, the performance increases are notable, going back to iPhone 5S, Apple has averaged 133% performance increases every four years. Most interesting for this iPhone 13th cycle are those Apple customers coming from an iPhone 10 or 10S. They're going to see a

91% performance increase. Our continued research in the smartphone category consistently reveals that most customers upgrade when they feel their current devices old and slow. Those customers, upgrading every three to four years, which is the norm, would see between 80 to 91% performance increases during their refresh cycles. Apple still has a large current install base of iPhone 8, 10, and 10s smartphones, which I believe will lead the iPhone 13 cycle. Those customers are up for a huge upgrade in their total iPhone experience. As I benchmarked the A15 Bionic in different ways and pondered how Apple spends its transistor budget with each A-series chip cycle, an interesting shift emerged for iPhone 13. Going back to how Apple spends their transistor budget on features, not necessarily performance,

For the A-15, Apple looks to have had the most GPU gains year-over-year since the A-9. For the past five years, Apple has had an average of 19% GPU gains year-over-year, but for the A-15 bionic, Apple has increased GPU performance by 52%, end quote. YouTube is apparently testing letting premium subscribers download videos from its desktop site, quoting Android police. Downloading content for playback later is most useful on mobile, where your connection quality is determined by your location. But there are plenty of us whose home connection isn't so great either,

or who prefer to playback media on laptops that are likewise limited by location. To that end, YouTube is now testing downloaded video on the desktop for premium subscribers only. The experimental feature was spotted by Android Police Tipsters, subscribe to YouTube Premium in India and France, and it appears to be available widely elsewhere. If you want to try it, head to YouTube.com slash new to check the Labs page while signed in. Downloaded videos can be played back at YouTube.com slash feed slash downloads, which is also available via the side navigation panel. It should work on Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS.

According to the text on the introductory page, this experimental feature will end its early test on October 19th. In the Settings menu, you can choose to download in various qualities with 1080P as a maximum or delete all of your local downloads from your browser cache with one button, end quote. Which is cool, because we've all been there, right? a video that you absolutely need a copy of from YouTube, and probably to get it, you went to some sketchy website and exposed yourself to spam or fishing just to get the video. If you want a software tool that actually works well to do this, you have to pay for it, but I've used the Soferino YouTube converter for years. So free, completely unprompted and unpaid plug for Sofrieno there,

link to the software in the show notes. Finally today, an interesting raise. from a company you might remember, Chinese AR glasses maker Enreal has raised a $100 million round, sources say at a $700 million valuation to develop its Enreal light glasses that connect with smartphones, quoting CNBC. Enreal has not launched its AR glasses in China yet, but its flagship product, the Enreal Light, has been retailing in a handful of markets, including South Korea, Japan, and Spain. Enreal Light is a pair of lightweight glasses which connects to a smartphone. Users can then experience so-called mixed reality apps where digital images are superimposed over the real world. The startup's backers include a number of major investors including Neo Capital, the investment arm of

electric carmaker Neo, as well as venture company Sequoia Capital China. NREL CEO Chi Zhu called Neo Capital a strategic investor and sees a potential for the two companies to work together. Quote, having AR and EV electric vehicles together, that can be very interesting going forward. There's something I can be sure of is there is going to be more and more EVs on the streets. People will spend more time in their cars, so a combination of AR and the car that will unleash a lot of other possibilities, end quote. She said that Enreal will introduce a new product next week and couldn't give too many details ahead of its launch. However, the CEO said

the new glasses will have a complete new design and will be lighter, more comfortable, and cheaper than the current Enreal light model, end quote. So I said that Enreal is a company you might remember because I talked about them a couple years ago when I visited their booth at CES. To this day, it was the most, they're just like glasses demo of AR I've ever personally seen, with the caveat that they still had to be tethered by wire to an Android device, but still very impressive nonetheless. Hey, the Ride Home Fund is live and taking subscriptions officially. Those of you that registered your soft interest, I apologize,

but I sent out two emails accidentally yesterday as I was attempting to set up the Angelus platform for the fund. Some of you asked if those were spam emails and were afraid to click the link, but it was not spam. The links are good, and I apologize for you getting early draft emails erroneously. But also, I think some of you might not have seen the emails because they probably went to your spam folder because I was sending from the ridehomefund.com email address. So either check your spam folder or just go to ridehomefund.com and click on the subscribe here link to subscribe to the fund. Even if you don't intend to invest in the fund but are curious about what we're up to

or how a rolling fund even works, feel free to click the link and read the fund memo. The idea of a rolling fund is you can invest at any time and you can stop investing after a period of time. It's different than a traditional fund where you have to have a set lifespan for the fund and that can't be altered. So even if you don't invest this quarter, it's always there. And as long as we're raising funds, I'll always be happy to have listeners. on board. Also, the fund officially launches to deploy capital on October 1st, so I'm going to do a

separate announce at a later date, because, number one, if you are a startup or work for a startup, about to raise around, send us your pitch deck, have us on your cap table. You can email me now at brian at ridehomefund.com, but also, as I say, I'll have a formal announced soon because remember, we'll also be doing a sort of scout program where if you, yes, you, help us land a deal, I'll share some of the carried interest with you. And you don't even have to be an accredited investor. You don't have to invest a dime in the fund yourself to do so. Just if you help us get in on a round in a meaningful way, you can share in the potential upside. More on that soon. Talk to you tomorrow.