Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/10 - The iPhone 11 Event

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, September 10th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, all the news from the iPhone launch. Also, the attorneys general officially go after Google, but why is California sitting this one out? And is Masasan pressuring Wii work to cancel its IPO, or is it still full speed ahead? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Okay, fam, let's do this. Apple has debuted the iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 pro, and, iPhone 11 Pro Max, all with A-13 bionic chips, all with better battery life. The pros come with 5.8 and 6.5-inch displays, get a triple camera system with zoom and wide-angle lenses, and come in six

Starting point is 00:01:24 colors. The 11 gets a 6.1-inch display and two cameras, one in ultra-wide lens, and also comes in six colors. Let's start with the 11. This is a 6. This is a 3.5-1-inch display and two cameras. This is, the iPhone 10R replacement. It's got, again, a 6.1 inch liquid retina display, which is LCD. The two rear camera sensors are a wide 26mm and an ultra-wide 13-millimeter lens. The front-facing camera now has a 12-mixel lens that can shoot 4K video. The camera system overall got some fancy new features. There's a pet portrait mode, which is now officially a thing. Portrait mode, but for pets. High Kimano is a thing, a new portrait mode option that basically gets rid of the background in a picture and makes everything high contrast black and white. Night mode is a thing. It comes on automatically. It makes photos taken at night brighter automatically.

Starting point is 00:02:20 And this was the coolest thing to me, switching between the various lenses when you're shooting video. You've got now a zoom wheel on screen that will allow you to transition in real time while shooting. So zooming in, zooming out. And speaking of video on all of these new phones. you can shoot 4K at 60 frames per second on any of the cameras. Also, quick video lets you tap and hold when you're shooting a photo to suddenly shoot video instead. The 11, as I said, has the same A13 bionic chip as all the new phones. Apple says the A13 bionic is the fastest smartphone CPU and GPU ever in a smartphone. Apple says iPhone 11 has an hour longer battery life than the 10R before it. Apple says it didn't have time to talk about faster face ID unlocking,

Starting point is 00:03:13 but that is also apparently a thing. This is maybe the headline, though. The iPhone 11 starts at $699, which is $50 less than the 10R came in at last year. So then the iPhone 11 Pro and and 11 Pro Max give you all of that plus an OLED screen, of course, that Apple is calling a super retina XPR display, which has a 2 million to one contrast ratio. Again, the screen sizes on the pro and the pro max are 5.8 inches and 6.5 inches respectively. And let's go back to that A13 bionic chip, which these phones have as well again. These chips are new 7 nanometer bad boys with 8.5 billion transistors. As Benedict Evans pointed out on Twitter, the original Macs CPU had 68,000 transistors. Apple talked a lot about how

Starting point is 00:04:05 these new chips make all sorts of machine learning magic processing possible on device. They've got eight cores. And Apple says they're 20% faster with 15% lower power consumption. In fact, Apple says the iPhone 11 Pro offers up to four hours longer battery than the 10S, which that's crazy if true. The iPhone 11 Pro Max, up to five hours longer battery life. To aid all this, Apple is shipping these new phones with, 18 watt fast chargers in box, finally. iPhones used to ship with a 5-watt charger. Before we get back to the camera system, again, the new Pro-Mex phones come in five colors.

Starting point is 00:04:51 There's also a new matte textured finish. But other than that, all of these phones are basically the exact same design as last year, except for, of course, the cameras. On to the cameras. The Pro- and Pro Max have three of them. a wide 12 megapixel camera, a 12 megapixel telephoto camera, and an ultra-wide 12-mecixel camera with 120-degree field of view. What can you do with those three? Well, you can zoom in two times and zoom out two times. Also, you can do a ton of neat stuff with new software, Apple demoed an app

Starting point is 00:05:26 that will allow video producers to shoot using all of the cameras simultaneously, so that you can then pick between them later when editing. The video, by the way, on all of these phones can be 4K at 60 frames per second. Also, there's a new feature that's coming this fall via software update called DeepFusion. This is how Matthew Panzerino summed it up. Quote, deep fusion shoots nine images. It pre-shoots four long and four short exposure images into a buffer. Then when you press the shutter, it takes a longer exposure. Then the neural engine and ISP combine these on a pixel-by-pixel basis into your final image, a machine learning. camera, end quote. So to sum up the phones here, let's start with prices. The iPhone 11 starts at $6.99. Again, cheaper than last year. The iPhone 11 Pro Pro Pro Max starts at $10.99. The iPhone 8 is still available, starting at $499. And the iPhone 10R sticks around at $599. You can pre-order all of these Friday, beginning at 5 p.m. PDT, and they ship September 20th. There were other hardware announcements today as well. Apple Watch

Starting point is 00:06:45 Series 5 is here with a built-in compass. New materials like brushed titanium, space gray titanium, white ceramic, and some sort of black Hermes version, which I didn't catch what made that one special other than the name. But the real headline here is that the Apple Watch series 5 has an always on display. Let me allow the verge to explain what that means. Quote, You can see the time without having to move your wrist, something that has been asked for since the Apple Watch first debuted in 2015. Apple says the Series 5 watch maintains the prior model's 18-hour battery life even with the new always-on screen, thanks to a new low-temperature polysilicon and oxide display and low-powered display driver. Watch faces and workouts have been redesigned to take advantage of the new display option.

Starting point is 00:07:33 The screen will be in a low brightness mode until you move your wrist, where it will switch to full brightness in a similar effect. fashion to how the current model turns on when your wrist is moved, end quote. The Series 5 watches are $399 for the normal watches and $499 for the cellular watches. Series 3 watches are sticking around starting at $199, and you can order today shipping September 20th. Also, there's a new entry-level 7th generation iPad, which has pencil support, at least first-generation pencil support. An A-10 fusion chip and a new 10.2-inch screen up from the 9.7-inch screen. So larger screen, but the bezzzles are still there, as is the home button.

Starting point is 00:08:18 A smart connector is available for a full-sized keyboard. And you've got an 8 megapixel camera up front, gigabit LTE for the cellular model. It's $329 for the entry level, $299 for education customers, you can order today, shipping at the end of the month. And P.S., everybody, iPadOS is coming out September 30th. And at long last, we finally got some info on those new services. Let's start with Apple TV Plus. It is launching November 1st for $4.99 a month per family. So super, super good pricing. As Tim Cook said, that is the price of a single movie rental. This is crazy, he said. What is more, starting today, if you buy an Apple gadget, an iPhone, an iPad, even Apple TV, etc., you can get one year of Apple TV Plus for free. The Apple TV Plus service is launching in 100 countries and will have 25 different TV shows and movies at launch with 12 more originals promised by the end of the year.

Starting point is 00:09:30 They showed a trailer for a show called C, starring Jason Momoa, about a dystopian world, hundreds of years. in the future where all of humanity has gone blind. But then babies start being born who can see once again. The whole thing looked expensive and dumb. And as I asked on Twitter, if everyone in the world is blind and babies started being born with vision, how would anyone know? At least until the babies grew up and could tell you? Also, why would everyone going blind, at least according to the show, send society back to caveman hunter-gatherer times? I mean, And there are millions of blind people on the planet today, and they function perfectly well in modern society.

Starting point is 00:10:11 It's not like they're all suddenly on the Asian steps hunting animals for food. In fact, hunting is super hard. So, you know, if everyone went blind, keeping modern society going would actually be comparatively easier. Anywho, I digress. We also know about Apple Arcade. It's available September 19th for $499 as well per month, per family. It's coming to more than 150 countries, with more than 100 games at launch and 100 more

Starting point is 00:10:41 games apparently coming in the weeks after that. There is a one-month free trial. Apple showed demos of a Frogger game that, for all the jokes on Twitter, about leading with such an old game, I have to admit, kind of looked cool. So, to sum up the whole event, a few odds and ends here, Tim Cook sounded distinctly under the weather. His voice was raspy. And for the first time in modern Apple history, no.

Starting point is 00:11:06 No Johnny Ive narration, no aluminum. Apparently, the voiceover role for the manufacturing video Johnny used to do has been taken over by Apple Hardware VP Dan Riccio. The whole event was a few minutes shorter than last year's September iPhone event. What else? iOS 13 will be available on September 19th as a free software update for iPhone 6s and later. Additional software features will be available on September 30th with iOS 3rd. 13.1. Other than that, I think it's worth noting that the word of the day was cheaper. A cheaper Apple Watch, the Series 3 at least, a cheaper entry-level higher-end iPhone, which is the iPhone 11, and a cheaper, well, cheaper compared to almost everybody, $5 a month for online TV streaming

Starting point is 00:11:55 and online gaming. So retrenching a bit, are we Apple? I guess you can do that if you're no longer trying to goose numbers via pushing the envelope on hardware average selling prices, and instead are happy to just gild the lily with more services. So there has been some other news, of course. Yep, it came down just as I was recording yesterday. Attorneys general from every U.S. state, with the exception of California and Alabama, but including AGs from the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have announced an antitrust investigation into Google. Quote, when there is no longer a free market or competition, this increases prices, even when something is marketed as free and harms consumers, said Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican,

Starting point is 00:12:49 quote, is something really free if we are increasingly giving over our privacy information, is something really free if online ad prices go up based on one company's control, end quote. Shares of Google parent company alphabet were down about 0.9% around the time of the announcement. When reached for comment, a Google spokesperson pointed to a company blog post published Friday, where it acknowledged it had received requests for information from the Department of Justice about its business practices and expects, quote, state attorneys general will ask similar questions, end quote. Quoting again, we have always worked constructively with regulators and we will continue to do so, Google said in Friday's post, end quote. So why did California

Starting point is 00:13:33 sit this one out? I mean, the obvious speculation would be because Google slash alphabet is domiciled in California, so maybe they didn't want to rock the proverbial boat. The only thing approaching an answer that I could find about this came from a Los Angeles Times article, which frankly just raises more questions, quote, citing a need to protect the integrity of, quote, potential and ongoing investigations, and quote, Attorney General Xavier Bekera declined to say, why he declined to join the chief law enforcement officers of 48 other states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico in examining the Mountain View-based Internet Giants dominance in online advertising. Alabama is the only other state not participating in the probe announced Monday.

Starting point is 00:14:19 Seeing as Bekera's office has one of the most robust and aggressive antitrust teams in the country, and his domain includes many of the largest tech firms, experts say it's perplexing that he elected not to take part, end quote. Also, I think it's worth thinking about this tweet storm from David Ruddock of Android Police, quote, My question remains, what exactly is there at Google to break up? The ad unit is the business. Everything else is essentially irrelevant. I'm not sure how you pull a bell on Google. Every single non-ad unit inside Google would be immediately snapped up by Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon, solving exactly nothing. None can stand on their own as businesses. The ad business is what makes them all work.

Starting point is 00:15:08 Divvy them up, and they all die. Break up YouTube, Apple and Big Cable Win. Breakup Search, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon win. Breakup News. Apple wins. Breakup Android. Apple wins. Break up ads. Apple and Amazon win.

Starting point is 00:15:21 Break up Gmail. Apple and Microsoft win. Breakup hardware, Apple and Amazon win, end quote. I don't know, though. I would push back on that. Some of those could certainly. live on their own. YouTube at the very least, the hardware cloud side, couldn't that compete on its own? And Android as an independent entity would certainly be interesting because basically they would

Starting point is 00:15:47 have to innovate in order to be profitable, which kind of would be the whole point of any sort of regulation that involved spinning off various Google divisions. Contradictory stories here coming out of the WeWork saga. sources are telling the financial times that SoftBank has been urging WeWork to cancel its IPO following a cool reception from investors. Basically, SoftBank is concerned that a WeWork flop on the public markets might harm the vision funds currently active fundraising efforts. SoftBank and its Saudi-backed Vision Fund have pumped more than $10 billion into the office space provider. But SoftBank's enthusiasm for a listing has waned as bankers have slashed the valuation they believe Wii Company can attain when it lists.

Starting point is 00:16:39 Advisors for Wee Company were said to still be testing investor appetite at a valuation of between $15 billion and $20 billion, according to people briefed on the matter. That is far below the $47 billion valuation given to WeWork when SoftBank invested $2 billion in the business this year. SoftBank itself is trying to raise $108 billion for a second vision fund to invest in technology startups. The Japanese group could face challenges raising that sum if we company were to list at a steep discount to its last funding round, the people said, end quote. But then this morning, CNBC's David Faber reported that it's full steam ahead. The WeWork IPO is going forward as planned and the investor road show is set to kick off this very Monday.

Starting point is 00:17:24 We've talked about that over the last week or so. As the expected range of set IPO has come down and down and down, you've wondered whether SoftBank would sit there and try to perhaps protest and say, please don't because you're going to force us to mark down our current investment, some $10 billion they put in the company at higher valuations. But it does appear, guys, that they are fully poised to begin a roadshow as soon as Monday for the IPO. And if it's got to get done at $18 billion or $19 billion, it appears that at this point the weak company is fully ready to take that on.

Starting point is 00:18:01 And perhaps you get down to that level, you actually find some demand and you can have a successful initial public offering. Now, David, I think a lot of people out who are watching this, you're saying themselves, how desperate? What the heck do they need to do the deal for? Well, they need to raise the money, given how much they're spending. Yeah, Jim Kramer. for WeWork and IPO is not just an opportunity to cash in. It's almost a required part of their

Starting point is 00:18:29 whole overall plan to keep their financial highwire act going. As Shira Oviday tweeted, quote, just a reminder, we work needs money, constantly, all the time, more money, end quote. But as the great Joe Wisenthal tweeted, quote, in my opinion, we work should just do the IPO. There's nothing to be gained by waiting. Neither the business fundamentals nor all the weird aspects of the company will change much over the next six months. Meanwhile, stocks are near all-time highs. Just get out the door and fight to survive, end quote. No time for end notes today, since I'm probably going to be late getting this out. So, talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/10 - The iPhone 11 Event

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