Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/22 - How Much Can Dark Mode Save Your Battery?

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

SoftBank is taking over WeWork in order to save it, Verizon will give you Disney+ for free, Surprise! Comcast’s “free” streaming box really isn’t, and how much does Dark Mode save in battery life? Quite a bit, it turns out… Sponsors: LegalForce RAPC (650-390-6461 or [e-mail]) Mealime.com Links: Neumann to Get Up to $1.7 Billion to Exit WeWork as SoftBank Takes Control (WSJ) Verizon Will Give One Year of Disney Plus for Free to All Unlimited Wireless Customers (Variety) Roku is buying ad tech company Dataxu in $150 million deal (CNBC) Comcast’s ‘free’ streaming box actually requires an additional $13 / month fee (The Verge) Forty-six attorneys general have joined a New York-led antitrust investigation of Facebook (The Washington Post) The Pixel 4 supports fast wireless charging on any Qi charger [Updated] (AndroidCentral) Dark Mode in iOS 13 significantly helps iPhone battery life, robotic test shows [Video] (9to5Mac) 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, October 22nd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. SoftBank is taking over WeWork in order to save it. Verizon will give you Disney Plus for free. Surprise. Comcast's free streaming box really isn't. And how much does Dark Mode actually save in battery life?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, they're all in now. WeWorks Board of Directors has voted to approve a rest of, offer from SoftBank, that means that SoftBank is effectively taking control of the company. As we said, the whispers were that WeWork was weeks away from running out of cash. In fact, in recent days, folks had been saying that the only reason there hadn't already been massive layoffs at the company was because WeWork simply didn't have the cash on hand to pay the severance. J.P. Morgan Chase, the other major money bag propping up WeWork to this point, had put

together a bailout package of their own, but apparently the board chose to go with Massasson, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The deal is expected to value the company at about $8 billion, a far cry from what it was expected to fetch in an initial public offering earlier this year, and even less than the $47 billion at which a January investment from SoftBank pegged its worth. As part of the deal, SoftBank, which already owns about a third of the company, is to buy nearly $1 billion worth of stock in WeWorks. parent from Mr. Newman, who was forced out as chief executive after pushback from new investors scuttled the IPO. The Japanese conglomerate will also extend him roughly $500 million in credit

to help repay a loan facility of the same amount, led by J.P. Morgan and also pay Mr. Newman a $185 million consulting fee, the people said. Mr. Newman, who is still chairman of Wicco, as the parent is known, is also expected to step down from the board, the people said. will maintain a stake in the company and remain a board observer. The nearly one billion dollar share purchase is part of a tender offer of as much as $3 billion from SoftBank to be extended to the company's employees and other investors, end quote. So sure, lots of snark can be made about failing upwards vis-a-vis Adam Newman. On CNBC this morning, Andrew Ross Sorkin said that, quote, this is a shareholder lawsuit waiting to happen, end quote, but the man does

own a certain stake in the company. You can't get him to give up what he owns if he doesn't want to give it up unless you pay him. That's the way things work. I don't know why I'm always apologetic about covering the WeWorks saga, but look, what was it? Six weeks ago, WeWork was just beginning a road show that was hopefully going to lead to an IPO valuation north of $50 billion or so. And now, at $8 billion, the entire company is worth less than just one investment round that SoftBank once put into it. They invested $10 billion in an earlier round. So what happened between then and now over the course of six weeks? What happened? Kind of nothing? Nothing other than people looking at their financials and being like, nah, not interested. That's kind of wild to think about. I mean,

every investment is entirely an exercise in faith. Uber is losing gobs of cash too, but investors believe that Uber has a way to get to profitability someday. That is the only difference between WeWork and any other company. Faith. Well, not the only difference, but this is the sliding doors scenario to think about. What if WeWork had gone public six months ago? What if WeWork had gone public before Uber? Would they have gotten their $60 billion or whatever valuation? And now people would be faithless with regards to Uber because Uber tried to go public later. I want to be clear, I'm not saying that Uber is at all like WeWork, but there is an alternative universe where investors did buy into the story that WeWork was peddling. And right now, today, it would be a public company.

The only reason that is not the reality we now live in is faith. Bowes are really starting to be thrown in the streaming wars. Remember how Apple TV Plus came in with a really attractive price point that was made even more attractive because if you bought a new Apple product for the next year, you'd get Apple TV Plus for free for a year. Well, Disney saw that and quickly countered with this. Verizon will offer all new and existing Verizon wireless customers, as well as all new Fios customers and new 5G home internet customers, a year of Disney Plus for free. As CNBC notes, this will land Disney Plus. millions of subscribers on day one for doing absolutely nothing. And if customers get hooked,

maybe they'll stick around, right? Variety has the details, quote, when Disney Plus launches November 12th, the Telco will begin offering 12 months of the video streaming service to all new and existing 4G LTE and 5G unlimited wireless customers. In addition, Verizon will extend the same offer to new Fios broadband or 5G home wireless internet customers. After the one-year promo pricing expires, Verizon's customers, revert to the regular $6.99 monthly subscription price unless they cancel Disney Plus. At launch, Verizon customers will be able to activate their Disney Plus subscriptions

on a selection of mobile and connected TV devices, including gaming consoles, streaming media players, and smart TVs. The telco provides more info on the offer at Verizon.com forward slash Disney Plus, end quote. And more streaming wars news. Roku is buying ad tech platform, DataZoo, which provides software for managing ad campaigns programmatically across digital platforms. The purchase price is $150 million in cash and stock, quoting CNBC. Boston-based DataZoo, a demand-side platform, provides marketers with automated bidding and self-serve software to manage ad campaigns programmatically across digital platforms. Roku said buying DataZus platform will complement its existing ad platform,

and give marketers a software solution that lets them plan by an optimal ad spend across TV and over-the-top providers. The company also said DataZoo's team includes strong talent in software engineering, data science, and analytics. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, end quote. As I've said before, while a lot of the streaming wars action is taking place on the battlefield of subscription services, there's also this parallel theater of operations where ad-supported content can be streamed. as well. And so video advertising, far from being shut out of the move to streaming, is itself transitioning over to the over-the-top paradigm. And Roku has been at the forefront of that. Data Zoo had previously been integrated with Amazon publisher services, thereby allowing

third-party TV providers on Amazon's Fire TV services to serve ad inventory. One more streaming story, and then we're done for today, I promise. I think we talked about it. Comcast recently announced its own free streaming video box called Xfinity Flex. It was designed to compete with the likes of Roku boxes and Amazon Fire TV sticks. Comcast said it was straight up giving it to its Internet-only subscribers. As The Verge wrote at the time, Having a flex in the homes of Internet-only subscribers gives Comcast a chance to take a cut of some of those subscriptions if it can drive sign-ups. Customers can also buy and rent TV shows and movie.

directly through Comcast using the box. The box also gives Comcast control over what customers don't see. As my colleague Chris Welch previously pointed out, Flex doesn't include cable package alternatives like PlayStation View and DirecTV Now, so the box can also help nudge people back towards Comcast's own cable service if they get sick of the limited offerings. It's also missing major streaming options from competitors like Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus. Neither will be available until November, but support isn't mentioned, end quote.

Also, of course, Comcast is planning to launch its own streaming service next year, plus Comcast-owned NBC is launching its Peacock streaming service. So, yeah, it all made sense. Comcast would get modern hardware in the living rooms, except it turns out that Comcast will only give you the Xfinity Flex for, in air quotes, free, if you also rent a modem and router from Comcast, something that will run you $13 a month, every month. So, I guess this is also a play to attempt to X out anyone going towards an ERO or a Google Nest mesh router thingy or whatever.

Quoting the Verge again, the $13 per month rental fee for the X-Fi Gateway is a complete rip-off that Comcast, like other internet providers, pushes on its subscribers because people generally don't know there's an alternative. Instead of paying Comcasts, an additional $13 per month in perpetuity, you can instead buy a modem and router outright. By doing so, you'll likely make up the upfront cost after a year, maybe two if you go for higher end options. Once it's paid off, you'll be saving the $156 per year that you're paying just to have a box sit in your house. So for Comcast to say that its streaming box, quote, is now included with an Xfinity internet-only subscription, end quote, that it is, quote, available to internet-only customers for free, end quote,

and that it is included, quote, at no additional cost as a part of an Xfinity Internet-only subscription, end quote, is misleading, if not outright wrong, end quote. As Chilmage said on Twitter, quote, I admire Comcast for making such a serious effort to remain the worst company in America. New York State Attorney General says that a total of 46 attorneys general have joined its antitrust probe into Facebook, which, again, is a completely separate probe from the ones the DOJ and the FTC are also running. When the probe was initially announced, New York State was only joined by seven other states and the District of Columbia. So this would be quite a bit more then, quoting the Washington Post. Facebook may have put consumer data at risk, reduce the quality of consumers' choices, and increased the price of advertising. New York Attorney General Letitia James Democrat said in a

statement. Given Facebook's nearly unprecedented influence in so many sectors of the economy and political process, this bipartisan coalition of attorneys general is committed to ensuring that Facebook is complying with the law and meeting its obligations, said Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring Democrat, one of 47 officials now participating in the probe. Arizona Attorney General, Mark Branovitch, Republican, added, by working together, state attorneys general are leading the way in ensuring digital platforms respect consumer privacy and do not engage in anti-competitive behavior, end quote. Reminder that Zuckerberg's going to be up on Capitol Hill tomorrow, talking to Congress.

Several different outlets are reporting that the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL phones will support fast wireless charging on any key charger, unlike the Pixel 3, which limited wireless charging to Google's proprietary pixel stand, quoting Android Central. As discovered by Michelle Rahman from XDA developers, the wireless power. consortium lists the Pixel 4 as supporting up to 11 watt for wireless charging, whereas the pixel 3 only shows a max speed of 5 watts, indicating that Google's weird proprietary speed restriction has been removed. We were also able to confirm this by placing a Pixel 4XL on a cheap Senio wireless charger from Amazon, and sure enough, the Pixel 4XL pulls over 10 watts when

placed on it. This was also confirmed by How To Geek Editor Justin Duino. While this is a welcome change of the Pixel 4's narrative. It is odd that Google didn't say anything about this during the company's press event last week. In any case, you should feel free to now pick up any wireless charger for your Pixel 4 and get max charging speeds no matter what, end quote. Well, small note of caution from me. As I said, my phone sits next to me on my desk all day, on a run-of-the-mill Belkin Boost Up special edition wireless charging pad. That is only a 7.5 watt charger, but all last week when I would set the Pixel 4 review unit on it, it would charge, but then after a period of time, sometimes minutes, sometimes an hour or so, even if I hadn't moved the phone, it had somehow stopped

charging. I'd have to pick up the device and place it back down again for it to find the charge again. I didn't mention this in my review because, hey, maybe it's only one phone. Maybe it was just me, but still, FYI. Speaking of phones and batteries and whatnot, have you ever wondered how much of a difference this whole move to dark mode for seemingly every app and OS makes when it comes to the battery life of your phone? Because aside from easing eye strain, that was one of the main promises of dark mode, right? If you switched over to a less blaringly bright setup, your screen would drain less juice every day. Well, according to a new test from phone buff,

at least on iOS, the impact of dark mode is significant, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Using an iPhone 10S as the test device, phone buff employed robotic arms to do various things throughout iOS while in light mode and dark mode. This included using the messages app, navigating in Google Maps, watching a YouTube video, and more. The end result is actually quite impressive. Phone Buff's test found that the iPhone 10S using dark mode drained the battery at a much slower pace than the iPhone 10S using light mode. When the light mode iPhone 10S died, the dark mode iPhone 10S still had 30% battery life, end quote. Click through to the piece to take a look at the chart because it's actually impressive. Four hours into the test, the dark mode phone had 72% battery while

a light mode phone was down to 57%. After six hours, dark mode still had 43% while light mode was all the way down to 20. A couple of caveats, the test was conducted with the displays set to 200 nits of brightness. And remember, dark mode has the biggest battery life effect on OLED screens. So you might not get the same results with, say, an iPhone 10R or iPhone 11. Hey, remember that time earlier in the year? I bought a new monitor because the old one had stopped working. And it turned out that all I really had to do was reboot the computer and it would have been fine. That day the lesson was, when in doubt, just turn the thing off and then turn it back on again. Or at least try that. Well, here's another basic tech life lesson. If you have a file that you rely on all

the time, maybe have a backup of that file somewhere handy. Every day, I open the same garage band template to record the show. All of the music cues are there. It's divided into segments. And then I just name the segments of the day. Name a new file. record, edit, and then hit export. Boom. Well, on Friday, I forgot to change the file name before doing all that and hitting export. So my trusty TRH template suddenly was all mixed up and edited with all a Friday's show on it and sound cues and levels were all mixed up in everywhere and the loops weren't looping anymore. And even though I tried my best to reconstruct it, I couldn't. The show you actually heard yesterday was a hastily sliced together version of three segments.

that I did to try to get around. My screw up, bottom line, I had messed up the file. I couldn't reconstruct it, and so my template was screwed. Would have had to completely rebuild it. Thankfully, I was able to recover an old version of the file from a time machine backup, but here is the lesson of the day, kids. If there's a file that you use every day, maybe just back it up, just once. But probably regularly.

If you have such a file right now, stop what you're doing and back it up. Then someday in the distant future, when your bacon is saved because you actually listen to me right now, you can tweet at me your thanks. Talk to you tomorrow.