Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 12/05 - Why The New Snapdragon Chips Don’t Have Integrated 5G

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

The FTC might be broadening its look into Amazon, the new flagship Snapdragon Chips, a disc-free Xbox, checkins with Slack, Imgur and Robinhood, and craigslist enters the 21st century. Sponsors: Metalab.co Vistaprint.com Promo Code: Ride50 (for up to 50% off) Links: Amazon Faces Widening U.S. Antitrust Scrutiny in Cloud Business (Bloomberg) Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865 and 765(G): 5G For All in 2020, All The Details (AnandTech) Sources: Microsoft Is Still Planning A Cheaper, Disc-Less Next-Gen Xbox (Kotaku) Slack Raises Outlook After Winning New Corporate Customers (WSJ) 300M-user Imgur launches Melee, a gaming meme app (TechCrunch) Red Flags for Robinhood (Fortune) Craigslist Finally Gets an Official App (Gizmodo) 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 Thursday, December 5th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The FTC might be broadening its look into Amazon. The new flagship Snapdragon ships are interesting because they don't have 5G in them.

A disc-free Xbox might be coming. Check-ins with Slack, Imager, and Robin Hood, and Craigslist enters the 21st century. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As the behind-the-scene invent, investigations of the tech giants by various agencies rolls on, I'm somewhat loathe to cover all of the drip, drip, drip of rumors and details leaking out. I mean, it would be endless and probably become monotonous. So we'll probably largely wait until the time comes that actual charges are filed or about to be filed if that day ever comes. But this little

wrinkle does seem important to me, even if on the surface it's just another rumor. So are telling Bloomberg that the Federal Trade Commission and its investigators who have been looking into Amazon's e-commerce business practices have widened their scope to begin asking software companies about Amazon's practices with AWS. But if these sources are to be believed, it does seem that if AWS also comes into the FTC's crosshairs, it's because the FTC thinks it's seeing a larger pattern here, quoting Bloomberg. AWS accounted for 60% of Amazon's operating income in the most recently reported 12 months. The unit's profitability in recent years has helped keep investors happy, even as the company continues to spend heavily, to expand both its retail and cloud computing businesses. Amazon also sells an array of products that run on top of those basic services, such as databases, machine learning tools, and data warehousing products.

It competes with hundreds of other software companies large and small that offer similar products. One issue the FTC could look at is whether Amazon has an incentive to discriminate against those software companies, which sell their products to clients of AWS while at the same time competing with Amazon. The fear is that Amazon could punish the companies that work with other cloud providers and favor those that it works with exclusively. The dynamic echoes that in Amazon's retail marketplace, where third-party sellers depend on the platform to reach customers because of its size, but in many cases they also compete with Amazon's own products. That's a conflict that threatens competition, according to critics, end quote. Samsung held its fourth annual Snapdragon Summit this week in Maui,

which, you know, Samsung. I cover hardware events now, so next year, just saying, anyway, the big news was the official announcements of the Snapdragon 865 and 765 chips. and just having groveled for a ticket to Maui, I do want to defer to the folks at Anantec who do a much better job covering chip news than I ever could. This year, Qualcomm isn't launching just one system on a chip, but rather two new platforms at the same time.

The Snapdragon 865 is self-explanatory in its positioning. As a direct successor to the Snapdragon 855, we expect the new chip to represent the best Qualcomm is able to deliver, liver and be the silicon that powers most of 2020's flagship devices. The new top model this year is accompanied by the new Snapdragon 765 and 765G system on a chips. As with other seven series models since the launch of the new range, the new generation adds on to the new features introduced with the new Snapdragon 865 at a lower performance level and a more affordable price for what is becoming an increasingly popular device category, end quote. But there is

one very surprising aspect to that new high-end chip, the 865. The 865 does not have an integrated 5G modem, which is surprising because, you know, everything is going to be 5G this year. And also, Qualcomm didn't leave out the 5G modem because it couldn't make it work. The 765, the cheaper chip, does have the integrated modem. So why does the flagship, or flag chip, I guess, not have one. Turns out there are very practical reasons. Quote, the technical difficulty of the 5G modem platform is actually on the platform and device side itself, as this will be the very first wide-range 5G implementation of a lot of OEM vendors who use Qualcomm's chips. There will be a large number of designs that will be integrating 5G for the first time. The problem is that this requires a

quite large development increase for the vendors creating the devices. they need to make sure their RF systems, antenna designs, as well as certifications of the systems are in full order. The nature of the 5G design complexity means that this process in a device's development cycle, this time around, is actually quite a lot more complicated and more time-consuming than what we've seen from past 4G phones. Qualcomm's solution to the problem in order to facilitate the vendor's device development cycle is to separate the modem from the rest of the application processor, at least for this generation. The X-55 modem has had a lead time to market being available earlier than the

Snapdragon 865 system on a chip by several months. OEM vendors thus would have been able to already start developing their 2020 handset designs on the X-55 and S-855 platform, focusing on getting the RF subsystems right. And then once the S-865 becomes available, it would be a rather simple integration of the new AP without having to do much changes to the connectivity components of the new device design. Qualcomm's explanation makes a lot of sense in practical terms and would bring time-to-market advantages. The company explains that in the future, it would reintegrate the modem back into the

system on a chip, and this generation's choices just made more sense for today's situation in the market. Qualcomm isn't the only one to have made such a choice. Samsung's X-Nios 990 system on a chip makes the exact same design to say. shipping the main system on a chip as a simple application processor without any modem, although we don't have any official backstory on their rationale for the design choice, end quote. Sources are telling Kotaku that Microsoft is planning to release a cheaper disc-free version of the Xbox.

The codename for this upcoming version is Lockhart, and it will go alongside the upcoming high-end version expected next year, codenamed Project Scarlet. Quote, If those names sound familiar, that's because they've been floating around for a while. The earliest rumors about Microsoft's next-gen roadmap, circa 2018, suggested that Project Scarlet would consist of two Xbox models, the high-performance Anaconda and the lower-end Lockhart.

In June, however, Microsoft announced that Scarlet was a single high-end console, which led to speculation and then press reports that Lockhart had been canceled. But Kataku has learned that Lockhart is... in fact, still in the works as a cheaper digital-only alternative to Scarlet, as the original rumors suggested. What we don't know, and what is likely not finalized yet, is how the pricing will shake out. But it's easiest to think of Anaconda as a successor to the Xbox 1x and Lockhart as a successor to the Xbox 1S with a similar performance disparity. Game developers will be expected to support both Anaconda and Lockhart, which some are worried

might hamper their ambitions for next-gen games in the coming years. When speaking to Kataku, one game developer briefed on Lockhart analogized it to the PlayStation 4 Pro in terms of raw graphical power, although there are other key differences that might make up for that. Lockhart is said to have a solid-state drive, like both Anaconda and Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5, which is expected to have a significant impact on loading times. Developers briefed on Lockhart also say it,

has a faster CPU than any current video game console, which could allow for higher frame rates, although there are other factors that might not become clear until the console is completely finalized, such as clock speed and cooling, end quote. I wanted to do a quick check-in with a unicorn that went public this year, just to see how they're doing. Slack has reported Q3 revenue of $168.7 million, up 60% year-over-year, beating analyst estimates. Also, Slack's losses are narrowing, and the company raised its full year outlook based on this key metric. Slack's paying customers grew to 105,000, up 30% year over year. And quoting the Wall Street Journal, Slack said it had more than 50 customers that

each generate $1 million or more in annual revenue, a newly disclosed figure, up from more than 30 a year ago. It also has 821 customers with greater than $100,000 in annual revenue apiece, up 67% from a year ago. The company posted a net loss of $89.2 million for the fiscal third quarter or 16 cents a share compared with a net loss of $47.7 million or 39 cents a year earlier. Excluding stock-based compensation and other items, though, Slack posted a quarterly loss of two cents a share compared with a loss of eight cents a share analysts pulled by Faxset had forecast, end quote. And yesterday we checked in with Reddit, so it seemed apt to do a quick check-in with Imager. Since Imager is so symbiotic with sites like Reddit, Imager says it now has 300 million

monthly active users, video game and board game tags are the most popular tags on Imager with 46% of users following them. And thus, quoting TechCrunch, that's why today Imager is launching Melee, the company's first app beyond its flagship product. Malay lets users subscribe to the games they love to get a feed of memes and gameplay clips. It's an elegant way to prevent you from seeing jokes you don't understand or feats of skill you don't care about. You can also scroll through a popular post feed if you're a popular post feed.

you're curious about unfamiliar games. Melee debuts today on iOS with an Android version coming in Q1, 2020, and a desktop version down the road. Quote, gamers are constantly taking recordings and screenshots of the games they're playing, Imager founder and CEO Alan Schaff tells me, quote, but we found that there's no place for gamers to share those clips. We want to give these highlights a home. If 62% of surveyed Imagerians, Imagerianians,

consider themselves gamers, and the average one already spends 30 minutes per day on Imager, despite it being a general purpose image-sharing network, there was clearly room to build something just for them. Schaff says, quote, Imager is interested in building things the internet wants, end quote. And let's check in with another unicorn, a check-in that is maybe not so rosy. As this Fortune magazine lead puts it, does this sound? familiar to you. A high-flying unicorn raises a ton of money at a crazy valuation, despite the fact that lots of people wondered how the company would ever find a path to solid profitability, much less actually unicorn-sized margins, especially because they're in a notoriously low-margin

industry. Well, in this case, we're not talking about WeWork or Uber or Lyft. We're talking about Robin Hood, and the industry is finance and investing. Robin Hood is one of the quintessential unicorns of its generation, often mentioned alongside those others we just listed, as well as Airbnb. Robin Hood was going to disrupt retail investing. They have 10 million accounts. They're popular with millennials, and they've raised a total of $900 million, most recently, at a $7.6 billion valuation. An IPO is rumored to be in the works. Except, again, those concerned trolls who wonder if there's actually anything there there, have popped up again. And by there there, I mean the magical margins that Robin Hood was promising,

especially because there are a flood of competitors who have basically copied what Robin Hood has done, especially its key differentiator of free stock trades. So now is Robin Hood facing, grinding it out for pennies in the same low margin industry they were supposed to upend? Is there a we work-style struggle to convince public market investors that their valuation is earned? Quoting Fortune. According to data shared with Fortune by one of Robin Hood's competitors, the company's lifetime revenue to date is between $600 and $650 million. While 20 to 25% of its current income comes from interest on customers' accounts and 55% from so-called order flow, rebates kicked back to brokerage. from marketmakers and other third parties that execute their orders. Robin Hood declined to comment

on the figures, though the 55% order flow number is consistent with recent reports that say the startup has been making it an even bigger part of its business. Meanwhile, a source close to the company said Robin Hood has, quote, a very strong balance sheet and that the, quote, vast majority of the money it raised is untouched. This still leaves the question of how the company plans to make a profit. Robin Hood won't say if it is in the black, but all signs are the answer is no, despite a recent initiative to save money by building its own clearing system. While its increased reliance on order flow has juiced revenue, it's unclear if this is sustainable, especially as Robin Hood has been sending those customer orders to high-frequency trading firms.

This practice, say critics, raises the potential for conflict of interest, since those firms are assuredly not interested in giving Robin Hood customers the lowest price on shares. There is also concern that regulators, who have been uneasy with order flow arrangements in the past, may revisit the issue at a time when more brokerages are telling retail investors that their service is, quote, free. Finally, there is the question of how many of the 10 million accounts Robin Hood is touting are active and how much money the average one contains. The startup declined to comment on this question, but it's unlikely. the value of those accounts is comparable to those at the more boring but profitable,

competitors like E-Trade or Charles Schwab, end quote. So I don't raise stories like this lightly. I'm not trying to pile on. I myself like the Robin Hood experience, and of course it's worth noting that they've been a sponsor of the show. But just as we did with Uber, as it graduated from Unicorn to Public Company, and especially as we did with WeWork, I think it's worth noting the connection. concerns around business models that some folks whisper about, especially if Robin Hood is about to try to woo public market investors. It's my job to tell you about those whispers so that you can be in the no, too. If Robin Hood does have trouble being convincing, this is the reason why.

And this would be from the better late than never question mark file. Craigslist, which has been around since 1995 has finally gotten around to launching an official mobile app, which is available now on iOS and is in beta on Android. You might remember that not only has Craigslist dragged its feet on getting into the app and mobile game, but there was a time when Craigslist also actively thwarted people that tried to apify or at least make mobile friendly skins of the Craigslist service. Well, no more, quoting Gizmodo. Like the website, the mobile app is extremely simple. No frills, bells or whistles. The app's overall design mimics the website as well, meaning it's mostly just text and a clean interface. As you'd imagine, that makes the app extremely fast and easy

to load. There's also a post tab that streamlines posting straight from your phone. Not that making a Craigslist post was ever hard, but the app does make the process a lot smoother. Right now, the app ranks number 14. in the App Store's shopping category and has an overall 4.6 out of 5-star rating from 63 reviewers. Not too shabby considering version 1.0 dropped just yesterday, end quote. As Jeremy C. Owens tweeted, Less than a month before the decade ends, Craigslist has finally entered it. And Casey Newton tweeted what was precisely my first thought on seeing this as well, quote,

okay, I need to formally apologize to Twitter for always saying they're slow to execute. Because nothing interesting to leave you with again today either. It's been a crazy, busy week behind the scenes over here for reasons that I'll be able to tell you about on Monday. Until then, I will talk to you again tomorrow.