Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/02 – iPhone 13 To Go Notch-Less?

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Is the iPhone about to lose the notch and join the hole-punch universe? Whole bunch of new features for Microsoft Teams, and also a new Microsoft smart-speaker. Instacart has a monster raise. Grimes has a monster NFT sale. Discovery+ is an interesting dark-horse in the streaming wars. Oh. And “fly” drones. Sponsors: Fundrise.com/techmeme Grammarly.com/techmeme Links: Kuo: iPhone 13 series to feature smaller notch, 120Hz display, larger batteries, more (9to5Mac) All 270 US Apple Stores are open for the first time since March 2020 (9to5Mac) Microsoft to add new shared channels, encryption for calls, webinar features to Teams (ZDNet) Microsoft’s new Intelligent Speakers deliver its promised meeting room of the future (The Verge) Instacart’s valuation doubles to $39 billion (CNBC) Grimes made $5.8 million in under 20 minutes selling crypto-based artwork (Insider) How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million (Reuters) Forget ‘Succession.’ You Can Watch ‘90 Day Fiancé’ for 100 Hours Straight. (NYTimes) Researchers introduce a new generation of tiny, agile drones (MIT News) Tonight's Clubhouse Experiment 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 Techmeme right home for Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Is the iPhone about to lose the notch and join the Whole Punch universe, a whole bunch of new features for Microsoft teams, and also a new Microsoft smart speaker. Instacart has a monster raise. Grimes has a monster NFT sale. Discovery Plus is an interesting dark horse in the streaming wars.

Oh, and fly drones. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. No more notch for the iPhone. Maybe. According to Ming Chi Quo, who says the iPhone 13 will have a smaller redesigned notch, a larger battery, and a 120 hertz display, at least on the pro model. Also, the iPhone Mini is going to stick around for at least another cycle, despite U.N. Grates, not buying it in the numbers that Apple expected. But for another year, do not expect USBC to replace the lightning port, quoting Mac rumors. Quo's specific. specifically writes that the iPhone 13 will be available in four models and the same screen sizes. This is the strongest evidence yet that the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 mini design will stick around for another year.

The analyst also corroborates that the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max displays will use more power-efficient LTPo technology and add 120 hertz support similar to the Pro motion display on the iPad Pro. The iPhone 13 will also include a reduced notch area as one of the main main. hardware specification changes. The camera will feature several changes with the iPhone 13 lineup. Quo writes that the iPhone 13 Pro Pro Max will feature an upgraded ultra-wide camera going from 5P and fixed focus to 6P and auto-focus, end quote. As for the return of touch ID in the form of some sort of fingerprint sensor on the power button, Quo says he has no visibility on that. But more on the notch, quoting 9 to 5 Mac.

According to Quo, Apple plans to start replacing the current notch design introduced with the iPhone 10 with a new to iPhone punchhole display design that sounds similar to what Samsung uses for its flagship galaxy phones. Presumably, the punchhole will be for the front-facing camera, creating an all-screen design around it. Meanwhile, Apple is expected to upgrade the front-facing camera's autof-focus capabilities in the iPhone 14 series of models. All iPhones in the lineup could adopt this punchhole display design if product yields allow, although Quo hedges a bit and says that at least high end, presumably pro models, will adopt it in the second half of next year. If Quo's prediction shakes out, it could be that the iPhone 13 pro replacements are the first to adopt this new design,

while the iPhone 13 successors retain their design that comes this fall, end quote. Sticking on Apple for a second, there's a sign of hope in a weird way from Apple. every Apple store in the U.S. is now open for the first time since March of last year, with many stores beginning to offer in-store shopping after operating for much of the year as Express Storefronts, quoting 9-5 Mac again. Over the past 12 months, Apple stores have weathered a rambling calendar of horrors that began when the pandemic hit. After starting to reopen from May 11, 2020, evolving health guidance and COVID-19 infection spikes forced some stores to reclose and reopen a second, third, or even fourth time. To top it all off,

rapidly evolving shopping trends and physical distancing have drained the life from many of the shopping centers and public squares. Apple calls home. These are just a few of the most visible and intense challenges of the past 12 months. The miserable cocktail of unfortunate events has tested the spirits of Apple's retail teams and kept all U.S. stores from reopening at any point before today. In addition to reopening every store, Apple is also starting to offer in-store shopping at more U.S. locations again after months of operation as express storefronts. Around two dozen stores in California, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, and Utah reintroduced shopping sessions today. That's on top of almost 50 locations last week,

more than 40 the week before, and dozens in early February, end quote. Remember back a year ago, Apple stores closing down became somewhat of a reliable indicator before even official lockdowns of where COVID-19 numbers were surging. So maybe Apple Store's reopening is an early indicator in the inverse. And from the big in COVID-Times file, Microsoft continues to roll out new features to teams, including end-to-end encryption for one-to-one team calls, channel sharing and webinar presentation features, quoting ZDNet.

Microsoft announced a new channel sharing feature coming to teams broadly later this calendar year. called Teams Connect, the feature will enable users to share channels with anyone, internal or external to one's organization. The shared channel will appear within a user's primary team's tenant alongside other teams channels. The new Teams Connect feature will be available in private preview starting today. In addition, Microsoft is announcing officially the expected webinar capability for Teams, which leaked last month under the name Teams Pro. Officials said today that Teams users can organize. webinars for those inside and outside an organization of up to a thousand attendees. Webinars can make use of custom registration, rich presentation options, host controls,

and post-event reporting. Officials said those who want to broadcast to larger audiences, up to 20,000 people until June 30th and 10,000 after that, can switch to view-only broadcast. The webinar functionality will be included at no additional cost in many existing Microsoft 365 or Office 365 business plans, end quote. And on top of all of that, Microsoft has also unveiled intelligent speakers, which can automatically transcribe teams meetings and use AI to identify up to 10 unique voices in those meetings. Now, I said intelligent speakers, they're smart speakers, sort of like if echo devices had a

baby with those speakerphone devices you often see on tables in conference rooms, quoting the verge. Microsoft demonstrated prototype hardware a few years ago that promised meeting rooms of the future with automatic speaker identification, transcription, and even translation. Microsoft now claims it's delivering this for real with new intelligent speakers, small puck-like devices that can identify up to 10 different voices in a Microsoft team's meeting. These speakers will automatically generate a transcript during a meeting with individual identification of those speaking. They will also help remote attendees follow along and see who's talking in a meeting. Microsoft has teamed up with Yelink and Epo's to create the hardware, and it even supports translation

if you want to follow a meeting in a different language, end quote. Unfortunately, no word on pricing or availability yet. Another sign of the frothy times. Instacart has raised $265 million in around valuing the company at $39 billion, and this is after raising $200 million at a mere $17 billion valuation, just this past October. Quoting CNBC. According to Pitchbook, Instacart is now the second largest U.S.-based unicorn behind SpaceX,

Elon Musk's space startup that's valued at $74 billion. The adoption of grocery delivery has skyrocketed during the pandemic as consumer demand for grocery and convenience delivery and pickup services surged. This past year ushered in a new normal changing the way people shop for groceries and goods, Instacart chief financial officer Nick Giovanni said, release. Technology IPOs have boomed during the last year with the likes of Snowflake, Airbnb, and C3.A.I more than doubling on their debuts. Investor appetite for tech in private markets has been strong as well. Online payment processing company Stripe is reportedly raising funds at

evaluation of over $100 billion. UiPath closed a $750 million round, which valued the robotic process automation company at $35 billion ahead of its anticipated IPO this year. Instacart has been preparing for a highly anticipated public debut, building out its C-suite and board over the past few months. Goldman Sachs will reportedly lead the IPO, end quote. And on the NFT front, the singer Grimes made $5.8 million selling around 10 pieces of NFT-based artwork within 20 minutes of debuting her collection on the trading platform Nifty Gateway this past Sunday. Quoting Business Insider. The singer launched her digital collection War Nymph on Sunday and plans to sell the crypto art for 48 hours. One piece, an image that depicts a baby guarding Mars, has garnered significant attention,

trading at over $300,000 in under 10 minutes. The newborn two NFT has already been relisted at $2.5 million. People online have speculated that the baby depicted in the collection is actually a representation of Grimes and Tesla CEO Elon Musk's baby, though Grimes described the baby in the artwork as the, quote, goddess of neogenesis, end quote. By the way, traditional art auction house Christie's just launched its first ever digital art sale, a collage of 5,000 pictures by the artist Beeple, which exists solely as an NFT, quoting Reuters. Bids for the artwork have hit $3 million with the sale due to close on March 11th.

We are in a very unknown territory. In the first 10 minutes of bidding, we had to be a $3 million. We had to more than 100 bids from 21 bidders, and we were at a million dollars, says Noah Davis, specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie's. His division has never seen an online-only sale top $1 million before, he added, end quote. So that little hack that I thought of, of keeping my eye on stocks hitting 52-week highs or even all-time highs as a sort of early warning system to get the jump on tech stories and trends has paid off once again. In my cursory scanning of recent highs this weekend, I noticed that shares of Discovery have basically tripled since October and doubled just since the start of the year. Now, number one, I was only vaguely

aware that Discover, home of the Discovery Channel, among others, was an actual independent company. And number two, we were aware that anyone doing streaming right now is being handsomely rewarded by the stock market, whether there end up being enough chairs left or not once the music stops in the streaming wars. We knew that CBS Viacom, among others, is doing well, too. But number three, I was also only vaguely aware that there's another plus named streamer out there, Discovery Plus, and it's doing very well, thank you very much, for the one simple reason of content, quoting the New York Times. 90-day fiancé is on some Sunday nights the most watch show on television. And in the latest innovation in streaming, Discovery Plus includes a channel that lets you watch it,

for four days straight without seeing the same episode twice. Now on the Discovery Plus show 90 Days Bears All, one of about a dozen spin-offs, including 90-day fiancé self-quarantined, the show can, quote, push the boundaries even further versus the standards and practices of a regular cable channel, said Howard Lee, the president of TLC, one of the cable networks that makes up Discovery's U.S. business. So you can watch the couple's scream curses at one another unbleeped or discuss their favorite sex toys. Discovery, the dominant programmer of what used to be called reality TV, and it now prefers to call real life, has emerged as perhaps the most successful new entrant to the complicated high-stakes competition known as the Streaming Wars. It is bringing

along a mostly female audience to boot. The company says it has 12 million paid subscriptions around the world, a more than respectable start that has helped make the company's stock among the best performing on the S&P 500 this year, though it's also writing a broader wave in the market. The app, which was introduced on January 4, has a sheer mass of content that rivals Netflix, with 55,000 episodes, and it's rolling out a suite of exclusive content dominated by American cultural figures like Oprah Winfrey, a procession of people cover fixtures led by Chip and Joanna Gaines, and pop icons including the chef Guy Fierry. Discovery also bid nine figures for a deal with Prince Harry and Megan Markle, but the couple chose to go with Netflix, which has been less insistent on exclusivity to people familiar with the conversation said.

Our bet is when the world makes a full rotation that the content people have chosen, when they could choose anything on TV or cable, the content that they love and run home for, 90-day, fixer-upper, property brothers, they're still going to love that, said David M. Zazlav, the president and chief executive of Discovery. In the end, people really don't change that much, end quote. That's Mr. Zazlav's unromantic version of the old declaration, that content is king, end quote. By the way, thank you to those of you that reached out to build out a recent high stock tool. If there is any public-facing version of this tool in the near future that gets developed, I will, of course, share it with you on the show. And finally today, we're used to drones as tiny helicopters, right? but what this segment presupposes is that maybe wings are better than rotors, specifically like the wings of a fly.

Researchers have introduced a new version of tiny drones that leans on the lessons learned by evolution in terms of agility in flight. Quoting MIT news, if you've ever swatted a mosquito away from your face only to have it return again and again and again, you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate an aerial world with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT assistant professor Kevin Yu Fang Chen has built a system that approaches insects agility. Chen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of

soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces. According to Chen, the challenge of building small aerial robots is immense. Pint-sized drones require a fundamentally different construction from larger ones. Large drones are usually powered by motors, but motors lose efficiency as you shrink them. So Chen says, for insect-like robots, you need to look for alternative. The principal alternative until now has been employing a small rigid actuator built from pisoelectric ceramic materials.

While pisoelectric ceramics allowed the first generation of tiny robots to take flight, they're quite fragile. And that's a problem when you're building a robot to mimic an insect. Foraging bumblebees, for example, endure a collision about once every second. Chen designed a more resilient tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard, fragile ones. The soft actuators are made up of thin rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. When voltage is applied to the carbon nanotubes, they produce an electrostatic force that squeezes and elongates the rubber cylinder. Repeated elongation and contraction causes the drone's wings to beat fast.

Chen's actuators can flap nearly 500 times per second, giving the drone insect-like resilience. You can hit it when it's flying and it can recover, says Chen. It can also do aggressive maneuvers like somersaults in the air. and it weighs in at just 0.6 grams, approximately the mass of a large bumblebee. The drone looks a bit like a tiny cassette tape with wings, though Chen is working on a new prototype, shaped like a dragonfly, end quote. Click through for picks, link, as always, in the show notes. Gonna do another little experiment on Clubhouse tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific.

I'm going to broadcast this episode on Clubhouse in its entire. Everybody, including me, is obsessed right now with being able to eventually take audio from Clubhouse rooms and release it as podcast audio. But also, I thought, what if we went in the opposite direction? As far as I know, no one has used Clubhouse as a method to broadcast their podcasts yet. No one has published on Clubhouse, so to speak. So tonight, let's be the first. Since we do the news every single day anyway, what if? we broadcast the show at the same time every night and called it like the nightly news or something, might that be a thing? We're going to try to find out. If you decide to join me in the room tonight,

I will open it up to anyone who wants to come on stage and speak after the show is done. And in fact, I might even be willing to hand over the moderator duties to someone so I can go to bed. So if you want to chat after the broadcast and possibly run the room, join me tonight. Link in the show notes.