Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 05/28 - The iPod touch Lives!

Episode Date: May 28, 2019

The iPod touch lives (and got an update), Dell’s whole laptop lineup got an update, the apocalypse is coming for small vendors on Amazon, MacKenzie Bezos signs the Giving Pledge, and why a laptop infested with malware sold for $1.3 million dollars. Sponsors: Sonic.com/ride Mealime Links: Apple refreshes the iPod touch with the iPhone 7’s processor (The Verge) Dell reveals new laptops aimed at gamers and business users (Android Authority) Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Long-Feared Purge of Small Suppliers (Bloomberg) MacKenzie Bezos pledged to give away more than half of her $37B fortune to charity and philanthropy (TechCrunch) Browser vendors win war with W3C over HTML and DOM standards (ZDNet) Driverless Delivery Vans Are Here as Production Begins in China (Bloomberg) Auction for a laptop full of malware closes at $1.3 million (updated) (Engadget) Subscribe to the ad-free Premium Feed! 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 ride home for Tuesday, May 28th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The iPod Touch lives, and it got an update. Dell's whole laptop lineup got an update. The Apocalypse is coming for small vendors on Amazon. McKenzie Bezos signs the giving pledge, and why a laptop infested

with malware sold for $1.3 million. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, it looks like Apple is clearing the hardware decks ahead of next week's WWDC. Apple this morning launched a new iPod Touch sporting the A10 Fusion Chip, which is the chip that can be found in the iPhone 7s. Also support for Group FaceTime and a new 256 gigabyte storage option. This is the iPod Touch's first update in nearly four years. The entire design of the iPod Touch is unchanged. Same 4-inch display, same home button quoting the verge. The A-10 chip does provide enough firepower for a few new features, including group

FaceTime calls and Apple's AR kit augmented reality apps, both of which were previously unavailable on the iPod Touch. The company says that compared to the older model, the updated version will offer up to two times faster CPU performance and up to three times faster graphics. Apple is highlighting its upcoming Apple Arcade gaming subscription service as a key part of the device, which is likely a reason for the spec boost, to make sure that the new iPod Touch can still run all those games. It makes sense given Apple's recent focus on subscriptions as a new revenue source going forward, end quote. Indeed, the words that Apple released in the announcement do in fact lean into that with Greg Josweak,

Apple's vice president of product marketing quoted as saying, we're making the most affordable iOS device even better with performance that is twice as fast as before, group FaceTime, and augmented reality starting at just $199. The ultra-thin and lightweight design of the iPod Touch has always made it ideal for enjoying games, music, and so much more wherever you go, end quote. Should be noted, though, the $199 price point gets you the 32-gigabyte model. There's a 128-gigabyte model at $299, and it's $399 to get the new 256-gibite option. But as Dan Masters snarked on Twitter, quote, still better than an iPhone 10S, no notch, 3.5 millimeter

headphone jack, and less than $1,000, end quote. And Dieter Bone tweeted this. True story. I just stared off into the distance and thought, man, I would probably buy an iPod touch if I could use an Apple Watch for its cellular connection in a pinch when you really need it. And now I won't be able to stop thinking about that all day, end quote. If you're a fan of laptops from the PC side of the universe, this was a big day for you as well because Dell announced a slate of new machines. Alienware is Dell's gamer lineup.

and the Alienware M15 and M17 will give you full HD 4K displays in the screen sizes those names suggest. They both get 9th-gen Intel Core processors with either Nvidia, G-Force, GTX, or RTX graphics, and you can soup them up to 16 gigabytes of RAM and 2 terabytes of SSD storage. And quoting from Android Authority, The Alienware M15 and M17 are gaming laptops sporting a magnesium alloy chassis, a brand new keyboard with 1.7 millimeter travel, and Alienware's advanced cryptotech 3.0 technology that provides increased airflow and thermal efficiency to keep the laptops running cool under load. The Alien FX customizable lighting is also available, allowing you to change the lighting color of the keyboard, power button, and more. The Alienware M15 is the most powerful 15-inch laptop in the company's lineup, while the M-17 is the thinnest one in its class.

Both are scheduled to hit shelves on July 1st with pricing starting at $1,500, end quote. The Dell G315 and G715 and G717 are also gamer laptops, again, in the screen sizes those names imply. But they're more affordable, starting in the $800 range. The Dell Precision laptops, which are aimed at business users' got upgrades as well, offering generally 4K resolution, 9th gen Intel chips, Radion Pro, or Invidia Quadro, RtX Professional Graphics, and are coming available in early July, landing at the $1,100 to $1,400 price range. The lineup of Dell Inspiron, General Purpose laptops, was updated with several two-and-one devices, but pride of place today probably goes to the XPS 2 and 1s.

Quoting Android Authority again, the XPS 13 inch 2 and 1 impresses with its eye-catching design and compact size. It features a 13.3 inch display with full HD Plus or Ultra HD Plus resolution and is powered by the 10th generation of Intel core processors up to I7. It runs Windows 10 and comes with as much as 32 gigabytes of RAM and up to 1 terabyte of SSD storage. The XPS 1321 sports the smallest camera Dell has ever put into a laptop at just 2.25 millimeters and promises up to 16 hours of battery life, which makes it a great option for road warriors. The entry-level model will set you back $1,000, but there's no word on when you'll be able to buy it, end quote.

McKenzie Bezos is going to give over half of her $37 billion fortune to charity by officially joining the Giving Pledge. We each come by the gifts we have to offer By an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand, wrote McKenzie Bezos in a letter published by the Giving Pledge today. In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care.

But I won't wait, and I will keep at it until the safe is empty, she wrote, end quote. Quoting from TechCrunch, founded in 2010 by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the Giving Pledge encourages the world's richest people to give away more than half of their wealth. Other notable names who have previously signed the pledge include Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, and many more. Today, the program announced 19 more philanthropists have signed their names to the pledge, bringing the total number of signatories to 204.

In addition to Bezos, other tech industry additions announced today include Tegan and Brian Acton, the latter of whom co-founded WhatsApp, the messaging app bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, co-founder of Bitcoin trading platform Bitmex, Bendello, Twillio CEO Jeff Lawson and Erica Lawson, lowercase capital partners Chris and Crystal Saka, and Pinterest co-founder Paul Sierra and Jennifer Sierra, end quote. notably not on that list, Jeff Bezos, McKenzie's ex-husband. Though Jeff did tweet his support this morning, writing, quote, McKenzie is going to be amazing and thoughtful and effective at philanthropy,

and I'm proud of her. Her letter is so beautiful. Go get him, McKenzie, end quote. It's apocalyptic days for some Amazon vendors. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Amazon will stop ordering from thousands of small suppliers, in the next few months, choosing to focus instead on wholesale purchases from major brands. Potentially thousands of mom-and-pop vendors will miss out on bulk orders from Amazon. Amazon's aim is to cut costs and focus wholesale purchasing on major brands,

like Procter and Gamble, Sony, and Lego, the people said. That will ensure the company has adequate supplies of must-have merchandise and help it compete with the likes of Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. The mom-and-pops that have long relied on Amazon for a steady, stream of orders will have to learn a new way of doing business on the web store. Rather than selling in bulk directly to Amazon, they'll need to win sales one shopper at a time. It's one of the biggest shifts in Amazon's e-commerce strategy since it opened the site to independent sellers almost 20 years ago. While the plan could be changed or canceled, it's currently moving forward,

the people said, end quote. The article says that vendors selling less than $10 million a year on Amazon's website would be affected. It's been a long tug of war, but the W3C has given up the ghost and says it will not publish future HTML standards. Instead, seeding the ground to a group of industry browser vendors. ZDNet has the history, quote, known as the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, WHATWG. This group was formed in 2004 as a research.

response to the W3C's slow pace of developing a more modern HTML standard, and the W3C's plans to move HTML towards a variant known as X-Html with an XML-like structure, which browser vendors at the time did not agree with. WHATWG, which at the time consisted of members from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera, considered the W3C's leadership, which also included many non-browser-related entities, did not have web development community best interests at heart. They rebelled and developed what would later become the HTML5 standard, which the W3C later formally approved as the next major iteration of the HTML Web standard after browser vendors put their support behind it.

In many cases, proposed standards would often ship in Chrome or Mozilla, even before they were finalized and formally approved by the W3C, showing that most of the time browser vendors considered getting W3C approval as only a formality which had little impact on the standards they decided among themselves at the WHATWG end quote. So now in a press release today, the W3C says that the official version of HTML will become the HTML living standard currently maintained by WHATWG. So definitely in the weeds news this, but it's also a monumental change. to take note of. The development of the larger open web is officially no longer being guided by a

neutral non-profit entity, but by the companies that make the web browsers, though in actuality, that has been the de facto state of affairs for a long time now. From the true driverless vehicles on the road by 2020 wager file, Neo Links, a Chinese driverless vehicle company, says it has begun mass production of autonomous delivery vans, say, it is the first company to do so, saying it will manufacture thousands of the vans in the first year, and saying that it is lined up JD.com and Huawei as its first customers. The vans, which cost $30,000 a pop, are smaller than the sort of van that you're thinking of. They look essentially like if you took a vending machine, put it on its side, and put wheels on it. And that's kind of

the point, of course. I'm flagging this story because nothing is a better sign of self-revelling. driving delivery perhaps becoming a reality than a company putting its money where its mouth is and actually beginning mass production of autonomous delivery vehicles, but also because this fits into the narrative we've been discussing a lot lately of those Asian super apps that basically will deliver you anything. So this is potentially a way to ride that trend to maybe make autonomous vehicles a reality. Quoting Bloomberg, billionaire Jack Ma predicts there will be one billion deliveries a day in China within a decade, and the commercialization of the technology of self-driving vehicles could provide lessons for autonomous vehicles carrying passengers.

While self-driving cars that carry passengers still face significant regulatory obstacles, Neolink's founder Yu Yanwan says the path has been easier for unmanned delivery vehicles. The company's vans are operating now in the new Giangan Economic Zone about 100 kilometers, southwest of Beijing, as well as in limited areas of the capital and the city of Shangzhou, end quote. A laptop containing six pieces of malware that have collectively been responsible for an estimated $95 billion in damages around the world has sold for more than $1.3 million at auction. What's that you say? Well, it might make more sense if I told you that this is an art piece, quoting in Gadget.

Dubbed the persistence of chaos, the Samsung NC10 contains six viruses that have caused an estimated $95 billion in damages. Despite what you might think, it's not meant to be a tool for any world domination scheme. It's intended strictly as an art piece, though it could be used for academic purposes, and it's currently isolated and air-gapped to prevent foul play. Commissioned by cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct, The Persistence of Chaos was created by artist Gao O'Dong, who told told the verge that the piece is a way to give abstract cyber threats physical form.

It contains viruses like Wanna Cry, which infected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries, and caused nearly $4 billion in damages, and black energy, which shut down a power grid in Ukraine, among other stunts. The laptop also contains the I Love You, My Doom, So Big, and Dark Tequila malware. Each is meant to be a reminder that ransomware has the potential for real-world harm. In its isolated air-gapped state, the laptop is harmless. In a sense, it might be comparable to collecting ancient weaponry. As long as you leave it on the shelf and don't pull the pin out of the grenade,

in this case connect to Wi-Fi or plug-in a USB. It should be safe, end quote. That is all for today. I've been your host, as always, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Subscribe to the show's subreddit at R-slash-ride-home, so you can tip me stories that I can use on the show every day. And if you want to listen to the show, ad-free,

the link to the premium feed is at the very bottom of the show notes. Talk to you tomorrow.