Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/23 - iPhone XR Reviews

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

Tim Cook demands a retraction from Bloomberg, another founder flees Facebook, Repl.it gets a murder’s row of VC backers and the iPhone XR reviews are in. Links: Amazon cloud chief Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story (CNBC) Apple CEO Tim Cook Is Calling For Bloomberg To Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story (Buzzfeed) Supermicro CEO Joins Cook in Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Supply Chain Hack Story (MacRumors) Oculus co-founder is leaving Facebook after cancellation of ‘Rift 2’ headset (TechCrunch) Former Facebook engineer quit to build the programming tool he always wanted (CNBC) Apple iPhone XR Review: Better Than Good Enough (The Verge) Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them (Bloomberg) Android: A Visual History of Google’s OS On Its 10th Anniversary (The Verge) 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 Memeerite Home for Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Tim Cook demands a retraction from Bloomberg.

Another founder flees Facebook. Replit gets a murderer's row of VC backers and the iPhone 10R reviews are in. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today, there was more fallout from that Blockbuster Bloomberg Businessweek report earlier this month. Here's a refresher. Bloomberg claimed. The Chinese government planted spy chips on super micro motherboards that made it into data centers for tech giants, including Apple, Amazon Web Services, and as many as 30 other unnamed companies. Ever since that report came out, and indeed in that report, Apple, Amazon, plus a variety of government officials, have denied the story full stop.

Apple issued a public statement on its website titled What Business Week got wrong about Apple, and detailed step by step what Apple thought about the story and the reporting process. Amazon Web Services also put up a blog post titled Setting the Record straight on Bloomberg Business Week's erroneous article. Apple CEO Tim Cook did an interview last Friday with BuzzFeed going even further, saying that Bloomberg should retract the story entirely because, quote, this did not happen. Cook went on to say, I feel they should retract their story. There is no truth in their story about Apple. They need to do the right thing, end quote. That marks the first time Apple has ever publicly called for the retraction of any. any news story. And Apple has been the subject of a lot of incorrect reporting over the years,

including a high-profile This American Life story about Apple and China that was retracted when reporter Mike Daisy admitted to fabricating key parts of it. On Monday, Super Micro CEO Charles Liang joined Cook and said, quote, Bloomberg should act responsibly and retract its unsupported allegations, end quote. And then Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, piped up on Twitter yesterday. He wrote, quote, Tim, Cook is right. Bloomberg's story is wrong about Amazon too. They offered no proof.

Story kept changing and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories. Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract, end quote. They're not the only ones questioning or denying the story, quoting Mac Rumors here. The UK's Cybersecurity Agency,

the Department of Homeland Security, former FBI General Counsel James Baker, and NSA Senior Advisor Rob Joyce, for example, have all questioned the veracity of Bloomberg's claims. End quote. For its part, Bloomberg continues to stand by the story. Here's what they told BuzzFeed.

Bloomberg Business Week's investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting during which we conducted more than 100 interviews. 17 individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attack, end quote. Cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perl Roth summed up the situation way back on October 7, tweeting, something is wrong. Blanket denials from companies NCSC and DHS are very unusual. The only precedent for this is a 2014 Bloomberg article by the same author, which claimed the NSA exploited heartbleed and was vigorously knocked down with zero follow-up by Bloomberg or

correction, end quote. I saw some tweets this weekend suggesting that other news outlets had even tried to chase down the veracity of the Bloomberg story and backed off when they couldn't find anything to back up the story. I could go on quoting people about this situation all day, but basically we're at an impasse at this point. On the one side you have Bloomberg sticking to its guns, but on every other side you have companies, tech researchers, reporters from other papers, government officials, you name it, saying the story is either wrong or that there's no evidence it's right. This is indeed a very strange situation. TechCrunch is reporting. today that Oculus co-founder and former CEO Brendan Eribe is leaving Facebook. This reportedly

comes after internal changes in Facebook's virtual reality group, including the cancellation of the planned Rift 2 VR headset, which was to be the PC-powered successor to the popular high-end Oculus Rift device. Guess who was leading Rift 2 development? Brendan Aribi. According to TechCrunch, Arribay left because he's concerned Facebook is focusing too much on low-end standalone VR devices rather than the more powerful PC-powered handsets. This past May, Oculus-Go headset, a $199 standalone standalone device,

and plans are still on for a standalone 399 Oculus Quest headset in the spring of 2019. Facebook, for its part, denies part of the report saying it still has plans for new PC-based Rift VR headsets in addition to standalone units. Though the company did not specifically deny canceling Aribay's Rift 2 headset. But still, this business narrative

sounds painfully familiar. High-profile co-founder of a company acquired by Facebook leaves Facebook after reportedly losing control of the core product he loved. Oh yeah, and his other co-founder was already out the door. It's almost like there's a pattern here.

Quoting TechCrunch, Arribes exit comes at a time when a number of the founders of Facebook's high-profile startup acquisitions are leaving the company. Less than a month ago, Instagram co-founders, Kevin Sistram, and Mike Krieger, announced their plans to leave the company and a decision that TechCrunch was told

was partially the result of mounting tensions. WhatsApp co-founder Jan Kome left Facebook earlier this year. Arribes fellow co-founder, Palmer Lucky, left Facebook in early 2017. A decision he recently recounted was not a choice that he made, end quote.

Josh Constine summed it up on Twitter, quote, Facebook pushes out another acquisition founder due to differences of opinion. Oculus's Bryn and Arribes saw VR for hardcore PC tethered gaming. Facebook sees it for mobile mainstream fun. Repplet announced yesterday that it has raised $4.5 million in initial funding. And a $4.5 million round hardly makes headlines these days. But what I noticed was that the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and other investors included Paul Graham, Y Combinator, and Bloomberg Beta and Research Capital. So a murderer's

row of backers. What does Replit actually do? That was interesting to me also. It's a tool for coders and it aims to replace their integrated development environment, also known as a text editor, their code repository and their dev server. Repplet is free to start using only $7 a month for the hacker plan with more goodies and schools have access for free or very cheap plans for students depending on the nature of the institution. The San Francisco-based startup aims to simplify the process of coding online by replacing all those independent pieces with an integrated tool. In the process, it aims to compete with GitHub, AWS, and dozens of code editing apps. Replit only has six people on staff and plans to use this influx of cash to staff up and commercialize the product.

The company said developers have shipped 250,000 website slash apps since the Replit hosting platform launched in March of this year. Co-founded by husband and wife team, Amjad Masad and Haya Ode. Replit represents a rethink of how developer tools should work in an age where maybe the only tool a developer truly needs is a web browser. Rather than pick the best in class from a bunch of apps and services, set it all up on a desktop PC and work out integration paths between all that stuff, developers can just go to Replit and start typing in their browser. Here's a quote from Replit's investment announcement.

Our new goal is to build a software development platform where you can with minimal prior experience, develop, ship, and acquire users for your apps all in the same place. Cloud computing is one of the most significant paradigm shifts in our industry, yet it remains commandable only by relatively few professionals. It's similar to when prior to microcomputers, only big corporations and universities had mainframes. We want Replit to be the microcomputer to the cloud's mainframe, end quote. The iPhone 10R reviews came out this morning, and again, They're mostly positive. The core themes seem to be that on the plus side, the 10R has a lower price,

better battery life. It comes on a bunch of colors, and its performance is almost exactly on par with Apple's highest and latest iPhones. On the minus side, the LCD screen is no match for an OLED, the single rear camera is no match for dual rear cameras, and there's no 3D touch. Here's a roundup of key quotes from the reviews. Nilai Patel at the Verge writes, I've always been a fan of how accurate and balanced Apple's LCDs are compared to the OLEDs on most Android phones,

and the 10R is definitely another Apple LCD. If you're coming from an iPhone 6, 7, or 8, it will look very familiar. But it's simply not as good as Apple's OLEDs. It doesn't have the deep black levels or infinite contrast of the iPhone 10S. It doesn't support HDR or Dolby Vision video playback. And in general, you can always see the border between the bezel and the edge of the display. even with a dark background, end quote. At Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes about the rear camera.

Quote, portrait mode on the 10R has a few limitations. For one, it only works with human faces. The subject's face does not have to be directly facing the camera. The subject can even be in profile, but there must be a human face for the camera to recognize. It won't work with dogs and it won't work with faceless mannequins. Portrait mode on the iPhone 10S, on the other hand, although optimized for human faces will work with inanimate objects, whether human-like or not.

Lastly, portrait mode on the iPhone 10R does not offer the stage lighting or stage lighting mono light effects, end quote. Matthew Panzerino at TechCrunch explains why the 10R is $250 less than the flagship 10S. On the business side, Apple is offering the iPhone 10R to make sure there is no pricing umbrella underneath the iPhone 10S and iPhone 10S Mac. and to make sure that the pricing curve is smooth across the iPhone line. It's not so much a bulwark against low-end Android. That's why the iPhone 8 and iPhone 7 are sticking around at those low prices. Instead, it's offering an affordable option that's similar in philosophy to the iPhone 8's role last year, but with some additional benefits in terms of uniformity, end quote.

Lauren Good at Wired goes deeper on that point, quote, most people, those who don't spend their lives comparing specs and staring at bezels on multiple models, models of new smartphones each fall are going to be very happy with this phone when they buy it, especially if those people are upgrading from an older iPhone, which I believe will be the case for a lot of people buying the iPhone 10R. They'll have a phone that's running on Apple's top of the line processor, they'll have face ID, and they'll experience the learning curve that comes with an iPhone without a home button, which feels like a small price to pay for an edge-to-edge display, end quote. Finally, Brian Chen at the New York Times writes, in speed tests measuring a

single computing core with a benchmarking app. The 10R was just as fast as the 10S, 49% faster than Google's Pixel 3, and 45% faster than Samsung's Galaxy S9, end quote. He also ended his review by saying, as is often the case for new gadgets, good things come to those who wait. If you resisted splurging on the 10S to wait for the 10R,

you will be rewarded with a great phone and some extra cash lying around. Bloomberg reported yesterday that developers can track the uninstallation of their apps on iOS and Android, and then target the specific user who uninstalled their apps using ads. Presumably, the goal is to get that person to re-install the app. The way these uninstall tracking tools work relies on the push notification system implemented on both iOS and Android.

Developers can opt to send silent push notifications to their apps. This feature is generally used to update information in the software. background, for example, updating a social media feed proactively or making sure an email inbox is up to date or downloading new podcasts, say. But because every installed app has a unique ID, the developer can listen to see if it given users app stops responding to push notifications. When that happens, it's likely that the user has uninstalled the app. From there, developers fire up their ad engines in an attempt to get the user back. According to the Bloomberg report, companies offering uninstall trackers include Adjust app, app,

flyer, Moe, engage, localitics, and CleverTap, among their customers, T-Mobile, Spotify, Yelp, and ironically, Bloomberg. There are legitimate uses for uninstall tracking. Developers might want to know if a given update led users to uninstall their app, and that might help fix bugs or even tell developers that feature updates are not welcome. The problem arises when unscrupulous developers decide to go beyond the basic knowledge that some population has uninstalled the app and get specific by targeting those. users in an effort to change their behavior. Quoting the report, the tools violate Apple and Google policies against using silent push notifications

to build advertising audiences, said Alex Austin, CEO of Branch Metrics, Inc., which makes software for developers, but chose not to create an uninstall tracker. It's just generally sketchy to track people around the internet after they've opted out of using your product, he says, adding that he expects Apple and Google

to crack down on the practice soon. Apple and Google didn't respond to requests for comment, end quote. Last up today, happy 10th birthday to Android. The Verge has an extensive visual history of the little operating system that could with screenshots that brim with nostalgia.

Remember the T-Mobile G1. Bet you do, but this is not a piece that lends itself to me summarizing. Again, it's lots of visuals. So do check out the last link in the show notes and wish Android a happy 10th anniversary. So the book came out today, thanks to all of you who pre-ordered. I've not been able to get into an actual bookstore yet to see it in the wild

because I've been doing press hits this morning. Shout out to KTLA's tech reporter Rich DeMorrow and his Rich on Tech podcast. And of course, also I had to record this podcast. But hopefully tonight I'll hit up my local Barnes & Noble on the way home. I did, however, get to listen to the audiobook version on the way in this morning, and wow, I'm glad I let a professional do it. Timothy Andres Pabon, who narrated the audiobook, is like amazing, clear, emotional, way better at this reading things for people's ears than I am. However, I was listening to the chapter on the iPhone, and unfortunately he did pronounce OS10 as OSX,

which is probably a mistake I would not have made, although I do butcher people's names on this show every single day, so who am I to cast stones? Anyway, if you're reading or listening to the book, please enjoy it, and I will talk to you tomorrow.