Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/12 – The iPhone 15 Apple Event

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

All the headlines from the iPhone event today at Apple HQ. Why is Meta blocking some basic terms on their new Threads search feature? TikTok Shop is rolling out broadly. And the US Copyright Office keeps knocking down copyright claims for AI generated Art. Sponsors: TryNom.com/ride Links: Apple Watch Series 9 Unveiled With S9 Chip, 'Double Tap' Gesture, and More (MacRumors) Apple announces new Apple Watch Ultra 2 (9to5Mac) Apple announces iPhone 15 with USB-C, a camera upgrade, and the Dynamic Island (The Verge) Apple iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max announced with titanium bodies and an Action Button (The Verge) Thunderbolt 5 offers up to 3x the speed over Thunderbolt 4 (VideoCardz) Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise (Washington Post) TikTok Popularizes Products. Can It Sell Them, Too? (NYTimes) US Copyright Office denies protection for another AI-created image (Reuters) 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 Mean Right Home for Tuesday, September 12th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from the iPhone event today at Apple HQ.

Why is meta-blocking some basic terms on their new threads search feature? TikTok shop is rolling out broadly. And the U.S. Copyright Office keeps knocking down copyright claims for AI-generated art. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. iPhone 15 event today. You're going to do it a bit differently. Let's just get right into it with what's new and not mess around. round. They started with the Apple Watch first. New Generation Series 9 looks basically the same as

the previous generation in terms of design and chassis. It's got a new Apple Silicon chip, though. It's called the S9 SIP. The CPU has 5.6 billion transistors, 60% more than the Series 8. The GPU is 30% faster. It's got a four-core neural engine now that allows Siri requests to happen on the watch itself. All this gives you 18 hours of battery life, which I think was what the previous version got. The display can now get up to 2,000 nits, double the brightness of the series 8 watches. There's a new gesture called double tap. If you tap your index finger and thumb together twice with the hand that has the watch on it, you can do things like answer and hang up calls. It's basically the primary button on any app that actually looks pretty useful, sort of double

tapping. Kind of feels like it was inspired by the Vision Pro's hand gestures. What else? There's some new pinkish colors. The new Apple Watch is apparently Apple's first entirely carbon neutral product. Then it was on to the Apple Watch Ultra. There's a new watch face called Modular Ultra, which uses the outer edge of the display. The screen can now hit 3,000 Nits, which is pretty nuts. Gets the same 36 hours of battery life. And that was about it. Pretty much incremental updates for both watches. You can order both today, shipping September 22nd. Then it was on to the iPhone. The iPhone 15, to be exact, this is the low end, the one with the two cameras, which is the easiest way to differentiate them by sight. The Dynamic Island has come to the iPhone 15. It's got

an OLED Super Retina XDR display. It supports Dolby Vision with 1600-knit brightness. Peak brightness is 2,000 nits in sunlight. There are two sizes, 6.1. inches and 6.7 inches for a 15 plus. The colors are pink, yellow, green, blue, and black. The main camera is 48 megapixels. That's an upgrade, right? The new 12 megapixel optical zoom is there. There's a next-gen portrait mode. You don't have to switch to portrait mode ahead of time now. You can make portraits afterwards in the photo app, which is nice. You don't have to decide in the moment if you want a portrait picture. I'm pretty sure the front selfie camera is unchanged. The 15s now have an A16 bionic chip, same as the 14 Pro.

Basically, we're seeing the trickle down from the pro models as expected year over year. Though the 15s now have a new ultra-wideband chip that will help you find your friends with the same precision that you use to find air tags. Roadside assistance is now available via satellite, partnered with AAA. Triple A members get it free for unlimited amount of time, I guess. but anyone can get it for two years for free just for buying a iPhone 15. But they really made folks like me writing headlines about this wait for so long to announce the big news. Yes, USBC. AirPods are now USBC as well.

You can also charge your AirPods from your phone now. The iPhone 15 is starting at $799. The iPhone 15 Plus starts at $899, and then it was on to the iPhone 15 pros. They claim that these are the lightest pros ever because they're using titanium now. They also have the thinnest borders ever on the iPhone. 6.1 inches in screen size for the pro, 6.7 inches for the pro max. The four colors for the pros look basically the same. Apple claims that a new internal architecture makes the iPhone more repairable,

and the inside is 100% recycled aluminum. The real new thing for these high-end phones is the action button. What do it do? default, it's still a basic ring slash silence switch. You just hold it down to do that. But you can also reassign things like camera launch, voice recorder launch, or even launch a shortcut. The screen is a super retina XDR display with ProMotion, extreme dynamic range and the always on display. But the chip is now an A17 Pro. It's the first three nanometer chip in a smartphone, Apple says. 12 silicon atoms wide, 19 billion transistors, six core GPUs, two high performance cores,

four high efficiency cores, the neural engine is twice as fast, they say, dedicated engines for pro res, the always on display, and AV1 video decoders for streaming services. Also, hardware accelerated ray tracing for the first time, USBC speeds of 10 GPPS for the pros, which again, only the pro models get, also 20x faster, than USB 2, data transfer, I guess. Side note here, why does Apple spend every iPhone event talking so much about mobile gaming when like, aside from casual games, who games heavily on their iPhones, even after all these years? As for the camera on the pros, again, this is the high end, the three camera iPhones.

Main camera is what they're calling a more advanced 48 megapixel sensor, 24 millimeters, 28 millimeters, and 35 millimeter focal lengths. with the main camera, you can set one of those as the default now. There's a 3x telephoto camera, but the new thing is their biggest optical zoom yet. 5x zoom at 120mm focal length, 25% larger sensor than the 14 Pro Max, 2.8 aperture, 100% focus pixels, basically a 5x telephoto lens. They still have that 12 megapixel ultra-wide lens. You can now do pro-res 4K 60 frames per second video.

and yeah, the pro gets USBC charging as well, of course, but this is something that I predicted with the announce of the Vision Pro. You can now also turn your Pro iPhone sideways and can record 3D spatial video, though that requires you to view such video on your Vision Pro, if you have one eventually, and capturing it only begins later this year as a software update. 15 Pro comes with 128 gigabytes of storage starting at $999,99. The Pro Max is 1199 at 256 gigabytes of storage starting pre-order on Friday, available September 22nd.

Interesting little addendum here. ICloud Plus now gets new 6 and 12 gigabyte storage tiers. I might have missed it, though. I assume these would cost more. I don't know what that cost would be yet. This is Apple News adjacent, as this will come to Max someday, I assume. Intel has announced Thunderbolt 5, offering up to 120 GbPS bandwidth and support for display port 2.1, USB version 4, USB 320G and PCIE Gen 4, and up to 240 watts charging, quoting VideoCards.com. The most recent advancement, Thunderbolt 4, introduced enhanced display capabilities allowing for dual 4K monitor support or a single 8K monitor. Additionally, Thunderbolt 4 mandated support for USB 4 specifications provided up to 100 watts of charging and offered a minimum data transfer rate of 32 GbPS. However, despite these improvements, Thunderbolt 3 and 4 both maintained the same total bandwidth of 40 GPPS and compatibility with a PCIE Gen 3 standard.

The updated version raised the minimum PCIE data transfer requirement to 32 GBPS, although Thunderbolt 3 also supported the speed, albeit not as a mandatory requirement. Consequently, gamers utilizing external graphics typically wouldn't recognize any distinction between Thunderbolt 3 and 4 enclosures. In October of the previous year, Intel unveiled its plans for a new generation of Thunderbolt technology, and today they officially introduced it as Thunderbolt 5. The standard offers a total bandwidth potential of up to 120 GbPS, hinging on the utilization of bandwidth boost technology. Thunderbolt 5 in its default configuration supplies an 80 GbPS bi-directional connection, However, when the need arises for high-resolution displays with increased refresh rates or for accommodating multiple displays, devices can harness the full 120 GPPS speed. In such scenarios, the receiving speed

can be flexibly adjusted, ranging from 80 down to 40 GPs. A noteworthy feature of Thunderbolt 5 is compatibility with DisplayPort 2.1, USB version 4, USB 320G, and PCIE Gen 4. This standard also includes charging support of up to 240 watts. eliminating the necessity for separate charging cables for some laptops. The inclusion of PCIE Gen 4 compatibility implies that Thunderbolt 5 will unlock greater bandwidth potential for external GPUs, potentially addressing one of the principal limitations of Thunderbolt 3 and 4 standards. However, for this to be fully supported, systems must be equipped with PCIE compatible links operating at 64 GPPPS speeds. It is anticipated that upcoming laptops,

potentially those based on the Meteor Lake architecture, might be among the pioneering systems to incorporate Thunderbolt 5. Officially, the first systems featuring this technology are to launch in 2024, end quote. Meta's Twitter competitor Threads recently got a search function, and what that tells us about how Meta sees this new social platform is interesting, because testing shows that it has some serious guardrails, including the blocking of words like sex, gore, vaccines. Meta admits that COVID is a blocked term, but has declined. declined to disclose others. Quoting the Washington Post, META acknowledged in a statement to the

Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by the post discovered that the word sex, nude, gore, porn, coronavirus vaccines, and vaccination are also among the blocked words. The search functionality temporarily doesn't provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content. The statement said, adding that the company will add search functionality for terms only, quote, once we are confident in the quality of the results, end quote. Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University, discovered this himself when he attempted to use threads to seek out research related to COVID, something he says he does

every day. I was excited by search on threads, he said, when I typed in COVID, I came up with no search results. Other public health workers criticized the company's decision and said its timing was especially poor, given the current coronavirus uptick. Hospitalizations jumped nearly 16% in the United States last week and have been rising steadily since July, according to CDC data, though they remain less than what they were for the comparable week a year ago. Deaths are less than a quarter of what they were year-to-year, CDC statistics show. Emily Vraga, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota's Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said the decision to block search results for important keywords, quote, does not situate threads as a replacement for the Twitter

that once existed, end quote. The decision, Vraga said, was indicative of meta's apparent inability to meaningfully moderate content at scale. Meta and all of its products have long had a hands-off approach, she said. They really don't want to be seen as deciding truth versus not truth, and I think this is a continuation of that. They're often sidestepping the really complicated and very difficult moderation decisions, end quote. Haney Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in technology and disinformation, said that blocking search results for certain terms does at least show that meta is thinking about disinformation, though he called blocking search terms an imprecise moderation method, end quote.

Years from now, this might end up being the biggest news of the day, historically speaking. TikTok has begun rolling out TikTok shop to all U.S. users, adding a home screen shop button that sends users to a marketplace and already has more than 200,000 sellers. on that marketplace. Quoting the Times. After nearly a year of testing, speculation, and some internal upheaval, TikTok this week is rolling out TikTok shop for all users in the United States. The company will expand the rollout of a shop button on the app's home screen, which sends people to a marketplace and drive traffic to videos that contain shop buttons for specific products. Both enable users to buy products and a few clicks without leaving the app. E-commerce is a

significant bet for the company, which is hoping to translate the app's power as a cultural trendsetter, into another big new revenue stream. But it is a venture that other popular social platforms, including Instagram, have not succeeded with in the U.S. To make it a hit, TikTok said it is actively driving videos with shopping buttons into users' feeds. The company is also, for the time being, giving generous discounts and coupons to users who shop and forego commissions from many sellers. TikTok said that it had already signed up 200,000 sellers to TikTok shop and that more than

100,000 creators could make videos and live stream with shopping buttons. quote. Or maybe this will be the headline that history remembers. The U.S. Copyright Office has denied protection for an AI-made image that won an art competition despite Adobe Photoshop alterations and more than 624 text prompt revisions. Quoting Reuters, the U.S. Copyright Office has again rejected copyright protection for art created using artificial intelligence, denying a request by artists Jason M. Allen for a copyright covering an award-winning image. he created with the generative AI system Mid-Journey. The Office said on Tuesday that Alan's science fiction-themed image theater diopra spatial was not entitled to copyright protection because

it was not the product of human authorship. The Copyright Office in February rescinded copyrights for images that artist Chris Kachdinova created using Mid Journey for a graphic novel called Zaria of the Dawn, dismissing the argument that the images showed Kachinova's own creative expression. It is also rejected a copyright for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler said his AI system created autonomously. Alan applied last September to register a copyright in theater-to-opra spatial and image evoking a futuristic royal court that won the Colorado State Fair's art competition in 2022. A copyright office examiner requested more information about Mid Journey's role in creating the image, which had received national attention as the first

AI-generated work to win the contest. Alan told the office that he, quote, input numerous revisions and text prompts at least 624 times to arrive at the initial version. of the image, using Mid Journey and altered it with Adobe Photoshop. The office asked Alan to disclaim the parts of the image that Mid Journey generated in order to receive copyright protection. It rejected Allen's application after he declined. The Office's Copyright Review Board affirmed the decision on Tuesday finding the image as a whole was not copyrightable because it contained more than a minimal amount of AI-created material. Alan said on Wednesday that the office's decision on his work was expected, but he was, quote, certain we will win in the end, end, end.

Getting this out to you as soon as humanly possible. Talk to you tomorrow.