Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/15 – The Apple “Time Flies” Event

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

A full rundown of the Time Flies event from Apple. New Apple Watches, including an Apple Watch SE. Refreshed iPad, but redesigned iPad Air that is giving the iPad Pro a run for its money. An Apple Fitness+ subscription program. An Apple One subscription bundle. And meanwhile, Sony cuts PlayStation 5 production, we have a date for Google’s Pixel 5 launch and why it might actually be a good idea to put your data center at the bottom of the ocean. Sponsors: LiftOff.to PayPal App Links: Techmeme Headline Rundown of the Apple Event Sony Cuts PlayStation 5 Forecast by 4 Million Due to Chip Woes (Bloomberg) Sen. Hawley calls for US to reject Oracle’s TikTok deal (The Verge) We’re Heading Toward the Worst Possible Outcome on TikTok (Intelligencer) Google to launch Pixel 5, new Chromecast, and smart speaker on September 30th (The Verge) Microsoft pulls underwater data center back to the surface to assess benefits of deep-sea cloud (GeekWire) 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, September 15th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. A full rundown of the Time Flies event from Apple.

New Apple Watches, including an Apple Watch SE. A refreshed iPad, but a fully redesigned iPad Air that is giving the iPad Pro a run for its money. An Apple Fitness Plus subscription program and Apple One subscription bundle. And meanwhile, Sony cuts PlayStation 5 production. We have a date for Google's Pixel 5 launch and why it might actually be a good idea to put your data center at the bottom of the ocean. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. We know that life won't always be like this and we're all looking forward to better days. Here at Apple we feel a deep responsibility to keep innovating to continue making products that

enrich people's lives in meaningful ways. Today we're focusing on two products that have played integral roles in people's everyday lives, Apple Watch and iPad. Yes, today was Apple's time-flies event. As Jeffrey Fowler tweeted, Nothing quite like the excitement of waiting for someone to press play on a pre-recorded hour-long commercial. But hey, it was just an hour long, a tight hour at that. So here comes the rundown in roughly chronological order. Apple debuted the Apple Watch Series 6, starting at $399, coming in new colors, including red and graphite, a new chip that is up to 20% faster and a new blood oxygen sensor. The design of the hardware is roughly the exact same,

if you don't count the new sensors on the underside for these new health bells and whistles. The main bell and or whistle is the blood oxygen monitor. It comes with a new blood oxygen app that will, in 15 seconds, check the oxygen content of your blood, something something COVID-19. But it will also take periodic background measurements, even while you sleep if you wear the watch to bed. The new S6 chip that powers all this is a dual core chip based on the A-13.

There were some new watch faces announced, including a typograph face, which looks pretty good to me. Also a whole bunch of new loops or wristbands, I guess they're called, right? Including one called the solo loop that has no clasp or magnets or anything. You just stretch it to fit your wrist. A couple of other watch-related things. there's a new family setup feature, which now allows you to use one iPhone to pair and control other Apple watches so you could say give them to your kids. This only works with the cellular versions of the watch. The idea is this is a way to keep track of your kids or your elderly

relatives without giving them a whole phone or something like that. Apple basically just killed the physical kid tracker industry. And also, Apple will no longer include USB power adapters with Apple watches, which is weird, considering we all have spare power cords from iPhones and iPads lying around, but the watch cable is the one cable that is unique. Apple also unveiled the Apple Watch SE, which has a Series 4 type design, an S5 chip for up to two times faster performance than the watch series three. But the SE is clearly a new lower-end entry-level play because it starts at $279 or $12 a month. But it does have. accelerometer, heart rate monitor, compass, gyroscope, motion sensor, fall detection, and GPS.

Meanwhile, the Series 3 does continue on sale at a mere $199. On all of the watches, you can order today. They are available on Friday. Apple then announced the expected Fitness Plus service, a workout class subscription service for watch and iPhone coming in at $9.99 a month, though you will get three months free with a new Apple Watch purchase. So imagine this. You can pick a workout, anything from yoga to cycling to dance, treadmill walks or runs, the whole gamut. You then watch the video of the workout on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV, and everything syncs up to your watch in real time for full activity monitoring. Apple wants you to know you can do these workouts on any existing equipment you might have or no equipment

at all. It's even synced up with Apple Music for Workout Playlists, which is a big shot across the bow of Peloton, which is currently in a copyright fight with the music labels. Again, this is a $9.99 per month service, or $79.99 per year, but your family can join you for free. This is coming later this year. But maybe you're the type of person that might want to spring for a bundle of Apple's various services. Say hello to Apple One, which will bundle Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade,

and various levels of iCloud storage, and, depending on what tier you get, Might also include News Plus and the just announced Fitness Plus. Those tiers are a bit confusing, though. There are three of them, and they range from $15 a month to $30 a month. For example, the individual plan is $14.95 a month, but it doesn't include fitness, which is weird for a plan called individual. It only gives you music, TV Plus, arcade, and a tier of iCloud storage.

You get that same bundle for $19.95 a month on the family tier, then coming in at 2995 a month, you get that same bundle for 1995 a month in the family tier, and then coming in at 2995 a month, you get all those four, including, I'm assuming, increased ICloud storage and Apple News Plus and Fitness Plus. On to the iPads. The iPad regular, the just iPad, the 10.2 inch entry-level iPad, got an A-12 chip, bringing in neural engine capabilities to the iPad for the first time. The design is similar to the last model iPad, and so is the price. 329 to start. Apple claims that that A12 chip makes iPad two times faster than the top-selling Windows laptop, three times faster than Android tablets,

six times faster than the fastest Chromebook. You can order the iPad today available this Friday. The iPad Air saw the biggest update of the day, a new 10.9,000, inch edge-to-edge display, but in the same footprint as the old iPad Air design. The chin now on the iPad Air is basically gone. It's not exactly a bezel-less device, but it's getting there, so much so that touch ID has been relegated to the Sleep Wake button. The Air also got the A-15 chip, Apple's newest top-of-the-line chip. Apple claims it's the first 5-nometer chip in the industry.

has high-performance caches, a six-core design, too high for low, 40% performance improvement over the last iPad Air, a new GPU as well. In other words, the iPad Air is now more powerful than the iPad Pro, I think. It didn't get the LiDAR of the Pro, and the Pro has more speakers and cameras, but unless I'm reading this wrong, the iPad Air now has the fastest processor. The iPad Air works with the Magic Keyboards, starts at $599. and is available beginning next month. One super interesting note, the iPad Air is also getting USBC. So as Dieter Bone tweeted,

if USB charging is good enough for the iPad Air, might it be good enough for the iPhone 12? Maybe we will see next month. And I think that's it. Apple also says that iOS 14, iPad OS 14, watchOS 7, and TVOS 14 will all be officially released tomorrow. So that is a bit interesting, too, to have a new version of iOS before the phones are even unveiled.

I think that's it. Again, it was a super tight event. I might actually have this show out to you before, 4, after all. There was, of course, other news today. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Sony has been forced to cut PlayStation 5 production for this fiscal year by 4 million units. This follows production issues surrounding its custom-designed system on a chip for the new console. Quote, the Tokyo-based electronics giant in July boosted orders with suppliers in anticipation of heightened demand for gaming in the holiday season and beyond, as people spend more time at home due to the coronavirus.

But the company has come up against manufacturing issues such as production yields as low as 50% for its system on a chip, which have cut into its ability to produce as many consoles as it wishes, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the deliberations aren't public. Yields have been gradually improving but have yet to reach a stable level, they added, end quote. So on the one hand, this is not good news, right? When two next-gen consoles launch at the same time, sometimes the winner of a generation is decided by which console gamers can actually get their hands on. Sony wanted to have 15 million units available because they knew demand would be off the charts. Now they're only going to have 11 million units available. And yet, as David Gibson tweeted, 11 million PS5s made by March 2021 would be the best PlayStation launch ever. Sell through might be 8 to 9 million perhaps, but still stronger than expected, end quote.

Remember how I said yesterday the so-called deal for TikTok? Maybe really wasn't a deal at all because nothing really changed. The concerns about TikTok being a Trojan horse for China. Chinese security shenanigans, for example, aren't actually being addressed with this Oracle tie-up? Here's how Russell Brandom put it in the verge. Quote, having Oracle takeover TikTok's U.S. hosting only addresses a sliver of the problem. It means China can't directly siphon user data, but it probably couldn't have before, given the app's U.S. headquarters.

Oracle's trusted partner status could include some code audits, but as long as the company isn't writing the code, it will be hard to stop bite dance from smuggling in some tracking malware if it wants to. Oracle won't be rewriting the TikTok algorithm or handling moderation, so it will be just as easy for BytDance to push Chinese propaganda or censor embarrassing messages. Oracle will be a contractor rather than a subsidiary, but it's not clear that will make them any less vulnerable to pressure or subterfuge. If you were concerned about TikTok before, there's no obvious reason you should be less concerned now, end quote. Indeed, in an open letter to Cephas, that committee that will nix or allow this deal to go through. Senator Josh Howley, Republican from Missouri, says

the U.S. should reject the Oracle TikTok tie-up on national security grounds. Instead, Halley wants what the president said he wanted all along, either a full sale of TikTok's U.S. operations or failing that, a banning of the app in the U.S. quote, Cephas should promptly reject any Oracle BightDance collaboration and send the ball back to BightDance's court so that the company can come up with a more acceptable solution, Howley writes. BightDance can still pursue a full sale of TikTok, its code, and its algorithms to a U.S. company so that the app can be rebuilt from the ground up to remove any trace of CCP influence. Perhaps given constraints imposed by Chinese law, the only feasible way to maintain American security is to effectively ban the TikTok app in the

United States altogether. The senator continues in the letter. In any event, an ongoing partnership that allows for anything other than the full emancipation of the TikTok software from potential Chinese Communist Party control is completely unacceptable and flatly inconsistent with the president's executive order of August 6th, end quote. Yep, this story is not over because CFS will give its final recommendations to President Trump later this week, and he will have the final say on if it goes through or not. But again, all of the stakeholders involved in this are going to get what they want, at least with what's on the table right now. President Trump will get to look like he was tough on China. China gets to keep the algorithm from being exported. TikTok gets to continue

to operate in the U.S. market, and Oracle gets a potentially lucrative hosting deal. Josh Barrow in The Intelligencer wrote something last night that echoed what I said on this show yesterday, quote, one of the big risks of state-directed capitalism, and there's really no other way to describe a situation in which the government directs one company to sell its assets to another company, is that political leaders will use state direction as an opportunity to reward their friends and supporters. That risk wasn't reason enough for the government to keep its hands off TikTok, but it appears likely the fight over TikTok will lead to an outcome where that downside of state capitalism materializes without the upside of reduced Chinese influence that we were

supposed to get, end quote. By the way, on this day of a different big tech event, Mark your calendars for yet another one. Google has announced it will unveil the Pixel 5, as well as new smart speakers and Chromecasts on September 30th at 2 p.m. Eastern, quoting the Verge. We invite you to learn all about our new Chromecast, our latest smart speaker, and our new pixel phones reads the invite. Google already confirmed its plans to launch a Pixel 5 later this year,

complete with 5G connectivity. The Pixel Maker revealed its launch plans alongside the introduction of the Pixel 4A last month, promising 5G versions of the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4A in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Australia. A new Chromecast is on the way to, and an update to Google's smart speakers. That will likely be the Nest smart speaker that Google confirmed back in July after an image of the speaker leaked online. The speaker looks like it'll be something between the Nest Mini and the larger Google Home

Max with the ability to stand vertically. Two new mysterious Google hardware devices appeared at the FCC last month, looking like they're related to a new Android TV product that Google has reportedly been preparing for a while. Google is rumored to be working on a TV dungle codamed Sabrina that would use Android TV and a traditional remote-driven UI. Chromecast devices are typically driven by smartphones, and Google's invite specifically mentions Chromecast, so it's not clear if these two devices will appear later this month, end quote. Finally today, I think I covered this once many, many moons ago.

In 2018, Microsoft sunk a bunch of shipping container size objects into the ocean in the waters around Scotland's Orkney Islands. Inside the containers was a functioning data center. The idea was the cool waters off Scotland would help, you know, cool the hardware inside, but also, interestingly, help keep the hardware safe. Well, Microsoft has reeled the... the underwater cloud computing center backup and declared the whole experiment a success, quoting from Geekwire. The tubular data center containing 864 servers was pulled up earlier this

summer after sitting on the seafloor at a depth of 117 feet. It's part of the years-long Project Nantik, designed to find out whether taking the cloud beneath the sea was a feasible exercise and whether the overall reliability of data centers could be improved by the conditions. The Natic team said that a variety of factors on land can contribute to equipment failure, from oxygen and humidity, temperature fluctuations, and bumps and jostles from people who replace broken components. Microsoft found the underwater data center to be eight times more reliable than those on land, crediting the dry nitrogen air inside the container as being less corrosive than oxygen. The long-term hope is that underwater data centers could better serve

a larger population near coastal cities because data would have a shorter distance to travel, making for smoother web surfing, video streaming, and more, end quote. No time for niceties today. Talk to you tomorrow.