Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/14 – The iPhone 13 Event

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Happy iPhone day, you fanfolk, you. All the news from today’s Apple event. Facebook’s own research says Instagram is bad for girls. Facebook’s own documents show it gives VIP users the VIP treatment when it comes to enforcement policies. And you might want to quickly download that iOS update. Sponsors: Stripe.com Oracle.com/goto/ride Links: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show (WSJ) Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt. (WSJ) Apple patches an NSO zero-day flaw affecting all devices (TechCrunch) 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, September 14th, 2021. I'm Brian McCalla today. Happy iPhone day, you fanfolk, you. All the news from today is Apple event. Facebook's own research says Instagram is bad for girls. Facebook's own documents show it gives VIP users the VIP treatment, at least when it comes to enforcement policies, and you might want to quickly download that recent iOS update. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. We started off the Apple event today with some previews of upcoming Apple TV Plus shows and movies. Did I know that Tom Hanks is in a movie or TV show for Apple TV Plus?

I don't think I did. And then, unexpectedly, it was on to the iPad. We got a new iPad. Full stop, not iPad Air, not pro, new iPad. This is the cheap entry-level iPad. Well, it is getting an... A13 bionic chip. It retains the home button. It looks like, well, it looks like an old iPad. This is a camera bump and processor update for the iPad. It does get that center stage tracking feature to

keep you in frame thanks to a new 12 megapixel selfie camera. Works with the first generation Apple pencil, though not the latest generation note. It's available next week, and it starts at $329 with 64 gigabytes of storage. Then, another surprise. The iPad Mini. This one did get a significant redesign. It looks like the iPad Pro and iPad Air now. New rounded corners, new colors. Larger 8.3-inch liquid retina display. 500 nits of brightness, true tone, wide color. No home button, though, for the Mini. Touch ID is in the on-off button at the top. CPU and GPU bumps, and it got a USBC port. And you can now get 4.4.com. 5G versions as well. The back camera is 12 megapixels, so 4K video recording. Front camera is also 12

megapixels ultra-wide, so it supports center stage as well. And this one gets the second-gen Apple pencil that magnet grips right to the side of the device. The mini starts at $499. Ordering begins today for delivery next week. Then it was on to Apple Watch, the Apple Watch series 7. And look, I was wrong. It didn't get as much of a redesign as I had been told. You can tell the new design just by looking at it because the bezels have been super reduced. The bezels are down to 1.7 millimeters, so it's a noticeably larger screen. They did say the case has softer rounded corners, but no flatter sides, as the rumor mongers had promised. The UI has thus been redesigned with larger buttons and supposedly room for 50% more text on screen. There's even a new on-screen keyboard for swipe typing. The always-on

screen mode is 70% brighter. It's got 18 hours of battery life and can charge 30% faster. And eight minutes of charge is enough for eight hours of sleep tracking, according to Apple. There are five new colors. Aluminum, stainless steel, titanium, new Nike and Hermes versions, new colors of bands. The Series 3 does remain on sale, so your entry-level Apple Watch is $199. The Apple Watch SE remains on sale at $279, and the Series 7 starts at $399. I will note that Apple said only that it would be available this fall. And notice, there were no new health sensors mentioned in this year's update to the watch. Then it was time for iPhone. It is indeed. being called iPhone 13 this year, so Apple wasn't afraid of a little numerical tempting of bad luck.

We are going to start with the base 13 model and then branch out from there. The iPhone 13 has the same basic design, though the cameras are diagonal now. As rumored, the notch is 20% smaller in screen real estate. The iPhone 13 Mini is also sticking around for now, and the case size on both remains exactly the same, though the battery, apparently on both, is slightly bigger. The screen is 28% brighter on both with 800 nits and 1,200 nits HDR peak brightness, same 6.1 and 5.4-inch screen sizes, and they're both getting the A15 bionic, which is a 5-nometer 6-core CPU with two high-performance and 4 efficiency cores. There's a 16-core neural engine. Though folks on Twitter kept pointing out that Apple would say things like,

These phones are 30% faster than the competition at X. That's unusual because normally Apple would mention that the new phones would be faster than Apple's own previous phones. So that suggests that these chips aren't really that massive of an upgrade. As for the dual camera system, it captures 47% more light. Both the 13s have sensor shift stabilization. One of the two cameras is now 12 megapixels wide. And as for the video, this was interesting. how about rack focus now available for when you shoot video? So, you know, focus up close,

then without cutting or doing anything, focus on the background of the same shot. Think of it as portrait mode for video. You can tap to shift focus at any time, tap again to lock focus on a subject, but the focus also transitions, which happens automatically. It even anticipates when a subject is going to enter the frame or look at another subject in frame to shift the focus to them. Even with all the new capabilities, Apple claims the Mini will get an hour and a half better battery life than the 12 Mini. The iPhone 13 will apparently get two and a half hours of more battery life than the iPhone 12. The Mini starts at $699 and the 13 starts at $799, but the starting capacity on both is getting a boost to 128 gigabytes with a new 512-gabyte option on the high end. If that sounds to you like they transferred a lot of pro features to the normal iPhone, you might wonder what the pro phones will get. Well, the design on the pros is also largely the same, though that camera bump, at least to me, looks significantly bigger. There's the 20% smaller notch again, and there's four new finishes, graphite, gold, silver, and Sierra Blue.

And yes, the Pro Max is there too, but no, the Pro iPhones did not move to USBC, like, Apple's other pro product lines. They've got the same new A-15 bionic chip, but in the pro models, there's a five-core GPU. Really with the pros, the headline feature is what they're calling the super retina XDR display. A thousand nits peak brightness with pro-motion variable refresh rate can go from 10 hertz to 120 hertz. iOS has been optimized to take advantage of the variable refresh right on down to how quickly your finger moves on the screen. As someone joked on Twitter, you can now doom scroll at 120 hertz. The entire camera system is new.

There's a 77-millimeter telephoto lens with 3X zoom, not optical, pure 3x zoom, 92% improvement in low light for the ultra-wide lens. There's 6x optical zoom across all three lenses, and the new wide camera has 2.2x improvement in low light. This allows the addition of macro with the ultra-wide. wide lens. Night mode has come to all three cameras. You can customize smart HDR settings with photographic profiles for different HDR looks that you can pull up from your settings when you want to use them. As for video recording, there's a new cinematic mode, which creates a depth map in the video.

So you can change Boka even after the video has been shot. There's also ProRes 4K30 recording. Note that both the Pro and the Pro Max have the same camera system. I believe, so no longer does the Pro Max inexplicably have slightly better cameras than the Pro. The battery boosts are here as well. One and a half hours longer battery life for the Pro, and two and a half hours battery life improvement for the Pro Max. And yes, there's a new 1 terabyte option for the pros when it comes to storage. The pros begin at $999, and the Pro Max begins at $1,099. All are available for order today, shipping September 24th. If they announced an iOS 15 release date during the event today, I missed it. And please note, no word on AirPods today. So if you were playing

surprising omission bingo, there's that. Basically, we got the iPad updates we were expecting next month today, but not the AirPods updates that we were expecting today. We did get the phone updates we were expecting and an Apple Watch redesign that we were expecting, though the redesign, as I said, was not as drastic as we were expecting. And that was it. I'd say a decent between-year set of updates for these devices. Do you think that Tim Cook thinks these are the best iPads and Apple watches and iPhones they've ever created? You bet he does. There was other news today, of course. News like the fact that internal documents reportedly show that Facebook's own research suggests Instagram is harmful to a sizable percentage of users, especially teen girls.

But the company has, of course, taken few remedial steps because of all of the reasons we're familiar with by now, quoting the Wall Street Journal. 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse, the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook's internal message board reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Quote, comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves, end quote. For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo sharing app reflects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company's

researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls. Quote, we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experienced the issues. Quote, teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression, said another slide. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups, end quote. Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users trace the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed. Expanding its base of young users is vital to the company's more than $100 billion in annual revenue,

and it doesn't want to jeopardize their engagement with the platform. More than 40% of Instagram's users are 22 years old and younger, and about 22 million teens log into Instagram in the U.S. each day, compared with 5 million teens logging onto Facebook, where young users have been shrinking for a decade, the materials show. On average, teens in the U.S. spend 50% more time on Instagram than they do on Facebook. Quote, Instagram is well positioned to resonate and win with young people, said a researcher's slide posted internally. Another post said, quote, there is a path to growth if Instagram can

continue their trajectory, end quote. In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app's negative effects on teens and hasn't made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it. The research that we've seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing in March 2021, when asked about children and mental health. In May, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app's effects on teen well-being is likely, quoting him, quite small, end quote. In a recent interview, Mr. Mosseri said, quote,

In no way do I mean to diminish these issues. Some of these issues mentioned in this story aren't necessarily widespread, but their impact on people may be huge, end quote. And I don't know who is leaking to the journal all of a sudden, but here's another one from the journal. Internal Facebook documents that the Wall Street Journal has seen also detail X-check, a program that shields VIP users from normal content enforcement policies, and those VIP users now include over 5.8 million accounts as of 2020. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook allows its more than 3 billion users to speak on

equal footing with the elites of politics, culture, and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The program, known as Cross-check or X-check, was initially intended as a quality control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company's normal enforcement process the documents show. Some users are whitelisted, rendered immune from enforcement actions, while others are allowed

to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come. At times, the documents show, Excheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users. In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Namar to show nude folks. of a woman who had accused him of rape to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook's fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up pedophile rings, and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum animals,

according to the documents. A 2019 internal review of Facebook's white listing practices marked attorney-client privileged, found favoritism to those users to be both widespread and, quote, not publicly defensible, end quote. Quote, we are not actually doing what we say we do publicly, said the confidential review. It called the company's actions, quote, a breach of trust and added, quote, unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences, end quote. Despite attempts to rein it in, X-check grew to include at least 5.8 million users in 2020 documents show. In its struggle to accurately moderate a torrent of content and avoid negative attention, Facebook created invisible elite tiers within the social network.

In describing the system, Facebook has misled the public and its own oversight board, a body that Facebook created to ensure the accountability of the company's enforcement systems, end quote. So, good to see that Facebook hasn't changed at all. It always and ever will just say it has changed or says it will change. or what's their mantra? It knows it needs to do better. By the by, if you watch the replay of today's Apple event, maybe take that time to also download the recently released iOS 14.8,

watchOS 7.6.2, iPadOS 14.8, and MacOS 11.6, because there was apparently a zero-day exploit that was being actively exploited, and these updates will fix that. More details from TechCrunch, quote, Apple has released security updates for a zero-day vulnerability that affects every iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. Citizen Lab, which discovered the vulnerability and was credited with the find, urges users to immediately update their devices. The technology giant said iOS 14.8 for iPhones and iPads, as well as new updates for Apple Watch and MacOS will fix at least one vulnerability that it said,

quote, may have been actively exploited, end quote. Citizen Lab said it has now discovered new artifacts of the forced entry vulnerability, details it first revealed in August as part of an investigation into the use of a zero-day vulnerability that was used to silently hack into iPhones belonging to at least one Bahraini activist. Last month, Citizen Lab said the zero-day flaw, named as such, since it gives company zero-days to roll out a fix, took advantage of a flaw in Apple's eye message, which was exploited to push the Pegasus Spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group to the activist's phone. Pegasus gives its government customers near-complete access to a target's device, including their personal data, photos, messages, and location.

The breach was significant because the flaws exploited the latest iPhone software at the time, both iOS 14.4 and later iOS 14.6, which Apple released in May. But also the exploit broke through new iPhone defenses that Apple had baked into iOS 14, dubbed Blast Door, which were supposed to prevent silent attacks by filtering potentially malicious code. Citizen Lab calls this particular exploit forced entry for its ability to skirt Apple's blast door protections, end quote. All right, here it is, everybody, the final round, the final showdown, and I guess we knew it was going to come down to this in the hashtag World Cup of Entrepreneurs,

who, at long last, is the better entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, or either. Elon Musk. Go to the at TechMeme podcast Twitter account and go vote. I'm going to let the voting go slightly longer than I have been so that you'll have plenty of time to cast your vote. And also retweet the ballot so lots of others can vote. Let's have this out once and for all. Talk to you tomorrow.