Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/21 – Apple Pledges 100% Carbon Neutrality by 2030

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Apple says it will be 100% carbon neutral by 2030. Microsoft has been talking to Congress ahead of next week’s hearings. LinkedIn is cutting jobs cause of Covid. Smartphone sales took a hit last quarter for the same reason. Coinbase kept its customers from sending BTC to those Twitter hackers. And might the entire autonomous driving industry be pivoting to less autonomy? Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride Discover.bot/podcast Links: Apple commits to be 100 percent carbon neutral for its supply chain and products by 2030 (Apple Newsroom) Microsoft President Met With House Antitrust Committee (The Information) LinkedIn cuts 960 jobs as pandemic puts the brakes on corporate hiring (Reuters) iPhone SE attracting Android switchers, unlikely to cannibalize iPhone 12 sales (9to5Mac) Coinbase says it prevented over 1,000 customers from sending $280,000 worth of bitcoin to Twitter hackers (The Block) AMD’s first 7nm Ryzen 4000 desktop chips bring the fight to Intel (The Verge) Self-driving industry takes to the highway after robotaxi failure (Financial Times) Subscribe to the ad-free 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, July 21st, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple says it'll be 100% carbon neutral by 2030.

Microsoft has been talking to Congress ahead of next week's hearings. LinkedIn is cutting jobs because of COVID, and smartphone sales took a hit last quarter for the same reason. Coinbase kept its customers from sending Bitcoin to those Twitter hackers, and might the entire autonomous driving industry be pivoting to less autonomy? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple has committed itself to becoming 100% carbon neutral across its entire business line manufacturing supply chain and the entire product lifecycle by the year 2030.

This is quoting Apple itself. Businesses have a profound opportunity to help build a more sustainable future, one born of our common concern for the planet we share, said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. The innovations powering our environmental journey are not only good for the planet, they've helped us make our products more energy efficient and bring new sources of clean energy online around the world. Climate action can be the foundation for a new era of innovative potential, job creation, and durable economic growth. With our commitment to carbon neutrality, we hope to be a ripple in the pond that creates a much larger change, end quote. Apple is providing detail on its approach to carbon neutrality with a roadmap for other companies as industries look to reduce their impact on climate change.

In its 2020 Environmental Progress Report released today, Apple details its plans to reduce emissions by 75% by 2030, while developing innovative carbon removal solutions for the remaining 25% of its comprehensive footprint, end quote. In the press release announcing this, there's a whole bunch of interesting details that at least I hadn't seen mentioned before. For example, Apple has a robot that it calls Dave, that now disassembles the teptic engine from iPhones to better recover key materials such as rare earth magnets and tungsten, while also enabling the recovery of steel, the next step following its line of Daisy iPhone disassembly robots.

All iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple watch devices released in the last year are made with recycled content, including 100% recycled rare earth elements in the iPhone Taptic engine, a first for Apple, and for any smartphone. Apple decreased its carbon footprint by 4.3 million metric tons in 2019 through design and recycled content innovations in its products. Over the past 11 years, Apple has reduced the average energy need for its product use by 73%. And Apple now has commitments from over 70 suppliers to use 100% renewable energy for Apple production, equivalent to nearly 8 gigawatts in commitments to power the manufacturing of its products. Once completed, these commitments will avoid over 14.3 million metric tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of taking more than 3 million cars off the road

each year. So, you know, I guess this one is from the Credit Win-Doo Department. Interesting little tidbit here. You know how next week is the big antitrust hearing with all of the heads of the five families, I mean the tech behemists, stepping up before Congress, everyone from Apple's Tim Cook to Amazon's Jeff Bezos. One company that was notably not given an invitation for their CEO to attend was Microsoft. But that doesn't mean that Microsoft isn't participating in this process at all. The information is reporting that the antitrust committee has already spoken with Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, quoting the piece. While the committee invited Smith primarily so he could provide Microsoft's perspective as a big tech company that has previously

faced antitrust regulation. During the session, the Microsoft executive also discussed his company's concerns about the way Apple operates its app store. That issue is at the heart of regulator's scrutiny of Apple in the U.S. and Europe. Smith expressed concerns about what Microsoft and others have viewed as the arbitrariness of Apple's practices around approving apps while also criticizing Apple's requirement that developers use the company's payment mechanism through their apps. Spotify and others have complained that Apple's payment requirement allows the company to take a burdensome cut of developers' app revenue as much as 30%. Smith didn't level similar criticisms against other tech companies on the call. One of the people with knowledge

of the session said, the main theme was an exploration of what Microsoft learned when it was on the receiving end of the earlier antitrust investigation. After a federal judge in that case initially ordered a breakup of Microsoft, the company eventually settled with the government agreeing to a variety of other less severe penalties, end quote. As Darya Abasandro tweeted, imagine telling someone from 1999 that one day Microsoft would be complaining to the U.S. government about Apple's monopoly. In tech, the only constant is change, end quote. This issue has sort of receded from the headlines a bit, but the coronavirus-related slowdown of some sectors of the economy is continuing apace. LinkedIn has said it will cut 6% of its

global workforce or around 960 jobs as the pandemic continues to have a sustained impact on demand for its recruitment products. Quoting Reuters, jobs will be cut across sales and hiring divisions of the group globally, announcing the plan in a message posted on LinkedIn's website. Chief Executive Ryan Roslanski said the company would provide at least 10 weeks of severance pay as well as health insurance for a year for U.S. employees and will hire for newly created roles from laid off staff. I want you to know these are the only layoffs we are planning, Roslansky said in his message. Affected staff, who have not yet been told, would be able to keep company-issued

cell phones, laptops, and recently purchased equipment to help them work from home while making career transitions, he said, end quote. Also, we used to worry a lot about this. New data from counterpoint research estimates that U.S. smartphone sales fell 25% year-over-year in Q2. Sales were down 10% for Samsung and down a whopping 23% for Apple, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. LG volumes dropped by 35%, followed by OnePlus at 60%, Motorola at 62%, and ZTE at 68%. According to Counterpoint Research's North America Research Director Jeff Fieldhack, Apple's performance during Q22020 was significantly helped by the new iPhone SE. The entry-level device is said to be selling above expectations and is unlikely to

cannibalize iPhone 12 sales this fall. Apple volumes grew through the quarter and were especially helped by iPhone SE volumes. The device has been successful and selling above expectations in both postpaid and prepaid channels. Since the iPhone SE launched, carrier stores and national retail have been reopening. Some channels saw large promos to draw shoppers back to stores. This was especially true within Walmart, Metro by T-Mobile, and Boost. Our checks show that iPhone SE sales are unlikely to be cannibalizing fall 5G iPhone sales because iPhone SE buyers are more pragmatic about price, less concerned with 5G, and the smaller display is not considered a hindrance, end quote. Fieldhack went on to explain that the iPhone SE has been especially enticing for Android

switchers with over 26% of buyers coming from Android. Quote, over 30% of iPhone SE buyers came from using an iPhone 6S or older handset, handsets four years old or older, over 26% of. iPhone SE users moved over from an Android device, which is higher than normal Android to iOS switching, end quote. So I do wonder at this point in the upgrade cycle, what percentage of drop in iPhone sales and Q2 would you have seen anyway? I mean, it is the upgrade year. Everyone knows this is the 5G year, so this is a big anticipated upgrade for a lot of people. Follow up to last week's big story, Coinbase says that in the wake of

the Twitter hack last Wednesday, it has prevented over 1,100 of its customers from sending Bitcoin to the hackers. The platform prevented 30.4 BTC from changing hands or around $275,000 in total, quoting the block. Despite Coinbase's action, its 14 customers still fell prey to the scam and sent around $3,000 worth of Bitcoin to hackers before the exchange blacklisted their address, said Martin. Gemini, Cracken, and Binance users also tried sending Bitcoins to the address, but not as much as Coinbase's customers, per the report. All these exchanges moved to block the addresses as soon as the scam came to light. Notably, this amount is more than twice the actual amount, $121,000 that hackers collected via victims, end quote. Now there's something ironic about this,

if you think about it. You know, the Bitcoin maximalists, the true believers in a decentralized currency, they shouldn't be happy about this news, right? In a truly decentralized scenario, these scammers should have been able to make three times more money than they ended up making. I mean, how decentralized is a currency if there are huge trading platforms that can, for want of a better word, enact financial guardrails, regulations, and the like. I mean, think about it. If someone stole a suitcase full of your cash of actual fiat currency, there'd be no way to get that. cash back. As Tom Guerra tweeted, the best and most maximally funny outcome would be if one benefit of Bitcoin over traditional money is that at least with Bitcoin, there's a centralized intermediary

that's really proactive about not letting its customers get defrauded on the internet, end quote. Though, as Dari Obasanjo tweeted, seems there's an opportunity here for Coinbase to proactively block addresses from known Twitter slash fishing scams as a feature, end quote. AMD has unveiled its 7 nanometer Risen 4,000 series of desktop processors based on its Zen 2 architecture, quoting the verge. AMD is starting with chips for consumer-focused pre-built systems by OEMs, which means customers looking to use the new 4,000 series chips

in their own custom built rigs will still have to wait a bit. It also means that it will be tougher to compare the new lineup to Intel's own 10th-gen chips, which it boasts as being the world's fastest gaming processor. It's also important to note that these chips are still based on the Zen 2 architecture, not the next-gen-zenzenzenzen-Zen 3 lineup that's expected to debut later this year. Specifically, the first line of desktop chips AMD is offering is the Ryzen 4,000 G-series desktop processor with built-in radion graphics that AMD says will offer a vastly improved gaming performance on the new APUs,

even without a discrete card, although you'll obviously be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be. able to pair them with a discrete GPU 2, assuming your OEM offers one. AMD says that the new chips are designed for consumer pre-built desktops, ranging from all-in-one designs to pre-built gaming PC towers. And as the company is announcing a trio of Risen 7, Risen 5, and Risen 3 models at both 65-watt TDP and a 35-watt TDP, they'll hit a range of performance and PowerPoints, end quote. Finally today, the Financial Times has an interesting piece up that's getting at something that I've sort of been saying all along about autonomous vehicles.

If you can already give me autonomy on the highway, why not just give that to me now? I mean, we have heard some of the reasons over the years why companies like Waymo decided they needed to go all the way to level five autonomy. But according to the financial times, some in the self-driving industry are now gravitating towards highway-only autonomy as the whole. whole dream of the go-anywhere fleet of autonomous taxis continues to be a dream deferred. Quoting the F.T. The sector is experiencing autonomous disillusionment, says Prescott Watson, principal at Manave Mobility and early stage venture capital firm. Now, quote, the pitch is Robotaxies are a pipe dream, but let's take this technology and do something more lucrative, he adds. Investors are still interested in autonomy, but the focus has shifted towards

practical services such as grocery delivery, automated warehouse robots, and autonomous functions restricted to highways. The concept of highway-only autonomy is currently capturing the attention of the industry. Instead of trying to solve the myriad challenges of Go Anywhere Robotaxies, engineers could focus on making it work on just highways to begin with. Autonomous vehicle startups see promise in America's trucking sector, an $800 billion market handicapped by driver shortages and rules that are limiting working shifts to 11 hours. McKinsey, the consultancy, has projected that full autonomy will not be commercially ready for trucks until 2027, but the likes of too simple plus.a.I, Ike, Kodiak robotics, and Embark want to accelerate that timeline by narrowing their focus to monotonous stretches of road.

One idea is to build transfer hubs near the highway in which a truck driver would carry freight a few miles to the hub, then swap the freight to an autonomous truck that would drive hours on the highway to the next hub, where another driver would be waiting. The other big area for highway-only autonomy is for passenger cars. Just a few years ago, this idea made little economic sense. In 2014, the cost of laser-powered sensors known as LiDAR, which most experts see as critical for developing safe autonomous vehicles, were $75,000 a piece.

Self-driving prototypes were often equipped with several of them, placing them well beyond the reach of even luxury buyers. But costs have since collapsed with some LIDAR groups, including Velodine, Ava, and Luminar, partnering with carmakers to build units at scale for less than $1,000 each. Alex Partners, a consultancy, estimates that a fully autonomous hardware stack comprising LiDAR, cameras, sensors, radar, and electronics will cost as little as $7,000 by 2025. That opens the possibility that individual car owners could soon purchase vehicles that would drive themselves. Tesla has long promised full autonomy in 2020, and among legacy carmakers, Volvo has said

it plans to offer eyes-off, hands-off autonomy for highways by 2022 pending approval from regulators. If we can solve the highway problem, which is quite narrow versus robotaxies, we can create tremendous user value, says Henrik Green, Volvo's technology chief, end quote. That's all for today. As ever, you can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show subreddit is our slash ride home. If you'd rather listen to me every day on YouTube, subscribe to the channel by searching YouTube for TechMeme podcast. We've even started breaking down our segments into smaller bite-sized clips on YouTube.

And of course, if you'd like to directly support what I do here every single day, the link to the ad-free subscriber feed is the very last link in today's show notes. Talk to you tomorrow.