Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/17 – Amazon Pharmacy Aims To Conquer Another Huge Retail Sector

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, November 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy. Twitter launches fleets, but the real news is that they're testing a clubhouse clone with audio rooms. Airbnb finally files to go public and running through the flood of reviews for the new Macs with Apple Silicon, I'm starting to become a believer.

Starting point is 00:00:55 If these reviews are to be believed, Apple might be able to revolutionize and run away with mobile computing with these chips. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Not exactly tech, but this news from a major tech company will probably have the biggest lasting impact on the broader business world and our entire society generally than just about anything else we could talk about this month. Amazon has officially launched Amazon Pharmacy, letting customers in the U.S. Order prescription medications for home delivery, and if you're a prime member, that even includes free delivery, quoting CNBC.

Starting point is 00:01:32 customers over the age of 18 will have access to the pharmacy service this week in 45 states, not including Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Minnesota. Amazon expects to serve those states over time. Amazon pharmacy will accept most forms of insurance, but could offer savings for people without insurance as well. Customers can also use flexible spending accounts or health savings accounts to buy prescriptions on the service. Before customers order medication for the first time, the site might ask them questions such as whether they're pregnant,

Starting point is 00:02:02 their date of birth and their gender as it was assigned at birth. That information is required by law to provide pharmacy care, and it helps pharmacists do things like confirm prescriptions. Doctors can send prescriptions directly to Amazon pharmacy, or patients can request a transfer from an existing retailer like CVS or Walgreens. Amazon says it has tools to verify that a physician legitimately ordered each prescription to tamp down on potential fraud. Amazon Prime customers get free two-day delivery, although shipping might take up to five days the first time a customer orders as it takes time to transfer a medication. Customers who don't have Prime can get free delivery within five days or they can pay $5.99 to upgrade to two-day delivery. The medicines on offer include a mix of generic and brand-name drugs.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Customers can get access to birth control as well as commonly prescribed drugs like insulin, steroid creams, metformin for controlling blood sugar, and sumatryptin for migrains. Amazon will not deliver skin. Schedule two controlled medications, including most opioids, and it won't be replacing the health and personal care store by offering vitamins and supplements. Customers who have questions about their medications can reach a pharmacist or pharmacy technician at any time through online self-service or phone. Amazon will also screen for potentially problematic drug interactions for customers who are taking multiple medications at once. Pharmacy stocks tumbled following the launch of Amazon

Starting point is 00:03:26 pharmacy. CVS shares fell 7.5% in morning trading. Tuesday, Walgreens Boots Alliance dropped more than 8%. Shares of Rite Aid slid by more than 16%. Good RX, which helps consumers find discounts on prescription drugs, fell more than 18%, end quote. Quoting Sean DeBravick, PhD on Twitter, quote, this has been a long time coming. Imagine one day being able to order the next COVID vaccine through Alexa, end quote. But as Jim Roberts tweeted, quote, perhaps this is old fashioned, but I'm not looking forward to Amazon pushing the neighborhood right aid out of business, end quote. We've known Amazon Pharmacy was coming for a long time, and we knew that this was coming, too,

Starting point is 00:04:11 but today it's also official that the fleets are here. Twitter has rolled out its ephemeral stories feature globally. Those are the fleets. But it is also announced it is planning to test an audio-based social networking feature similar to what happens on Clubhouse. First on the fleets, quoting TechCrunch. The feature itself is a fairly basic version of the basic stories format, which will be located at the top of the Twitter timeline. Users can post text, photos, and videos to

Starting point is 00:04:38 to fleets directly, or share tweets into fleets and post their reactions. Others reply to fleets via direct message, much like how stories work on other platforms. Twitter says more formats and creative tools will come to the product in the near future, end quote. But on to that Clubhouse clone, quote, like Clubhouse Twitter's new audio spaces will allow people to gather for live conversations with another person or a group of people. This is an area that so far has faced significant moderation challenges due to the nature of live audio. Clubhouse, though still in a private invite-only testing phase, has already seen several high-profile incidents of moderation failure, including the harassment of a New York Times reporter and other conversations that delved

Starting point is 00:05:20 into anti-Semitism. Twitter, for all its efforts at developing new features to combat online abuse, from its hide replies feature to its newer conversation controls, has not yet proven itself to be the sort of company that has managed to successfully combat online abuse, harassment, and trolling, nor has it managed to develop a robust reporting system where users feel their complaints are swiftly handled. So given that live audio has proven even more difficult to moderate than text-based posts, Twitter's decision to invest in this space will likely be criticized by those who don't believe Twitter can safely engineer a platform for this type of conversation, end quote. Now, worth noting that they're not just throwing the doors to these audio rooms open to just everyone yet.

Starting point is 00:06:01 They're beta testing with a small group of people, which, based on my experience with Clubhouse, is kind of the problem with this sort of product. Sure, I've had plenty of amazing conversations on Clubhouse, but I've done that because up till now, it has been kept to a small group of very select people. For as amazing as the conversations have been on Clubhouse, I see absolutely, zero way this will work when you throw the doors open to everyone. I can even report that recently the conversations on Clubhouse have gotten a lot worse over the last few months as the people on Clubhouse have expanded from a couple thousand to tens of thousands. And believe me, I realize how exclusionary and privileged that statement sounds. But I mean it to sound that way because that's the point I'm making. It's easy to have civil, in-depth, fascinating conversations when you

Starting point is 00:06:51 limit it to people who all sort of know each other to begin with and who generally share the same ideas and viewpoints. I simply don't see how any sort of audio product like this scales without becoming a total shit show. Happy to be proven wrong. Told you there was going to be a dash of companies going public before the end of the year. Last night, Airbnb released their public IPO filing. They're going to debut on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol ABNB. But unlike with DoorDash, which was surprising when we learned about the underlying strength of their business, Airbnb's business is generally what we all expected. It's been a tough year for Airbnb, but they've been weathering the storm as best they can, and probably better than you might

Starting point is 00:07:39 have assumed, quoting CNBC. The company made $219 million in net income on revenues of $1.34 billion last quarter. That was down nearly 19% from $1.65 billion in revenue a year prior. Despite primarily turning in net losses, the company has had other occasional quarters of profitability, including the second and third quarters of 2018 and the third quarter of 2019. In 2019, the company reported a net loss of $674 million on revenue of $4.81 billion. Thus far in 2020, the company has turned in a net loss of nearly $697 million on revenues of $2.52 billion. So revenues have nearly been cut in half. The decline is likely from the impact of the coronavirus, which put the breaks on leisure and business travel earlier this year.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Airbnb said its number of listings has declined and may continue to decline in part due to the pandemic. In particular, some people rely on Airbnb to help pay living expenses at mortgages, and those people may get knocked off the platform, end quote. As friend of the podcast, Rafat Ali tweeted, quote, Airbnb has $4.5 billion in cash and equivalence on the balance sheet, so they'll be fine through this dark winter and well into next year, end quote. But as also a friend of the show, Shira Ovita tweeted, quote, is it better to be Uber and see your numbers get ugly, but your stock price go up, the year after the IPO because of a pandemic-related travel freeze, or to be Airbnb pitching your IPO in the middle of a pandemic-related

Starting point is 00:09:09 travel freeze? Not sure, end quote. As promised, Adobe has released a version of Photoshop for Mac OS into beta that can run on those new M1 MacBooks, but they've also released an arm version for Windows as well, the better to run natively on, say, a Surface Pro X, quoting the verge. While performance might be improved as the app is in beta, there are a lot of tools missing. Features like Content Aware fill, patch tool, healing brush, and many more are not available in the beta versions currently. Adobe lists a number of known issues for both MacOS and Windows, but does note that new features will be added in the weeks ahead. The beta version isn't officially supported for daily workloads just yet,

Starting point is 00:09:59 and is only accessible from the beta apps tab in the Creative Cloud desktop app. Adobe hasn't mentioned when other Creative Cloud apps will make the transition to Arm 64, but Photoshop is a big boost for arm-powered devices. Alongside Photoshop support, Blizzard, also announced this week that World of Warcraft will run natively on Arm-powered Macs. The latest World of Warcraft includes Native M1 support. from day one, avoiding the Rosetta Translation Layer just in time for the launch of

Starting point is 00:10:26 World of Warcraft Shadowlands later this month, end quote. And speaking of that, our final blizzard of reviews for probably this year blew in this morning. The embargoes for reviews of Macs using the new M1 chips broke this

Starting point is 00:10:46 morning. Let me get two of the devices out of the way before we focus more on the meat of the interesting stuff, which, in my opinion, is the MacBook Air. include links to these reviews and the show notes, even if we don't delve into all of them deeply. At The Verge, Chris Welch says the Mac Mini with the new M1 chip is a mixed bag. Existing apps run well, and the price is certainly appealing, but with RAM limited, bizarrely,

Starting point is 00:11:11 to 16 gigabytes, and the inability to upgrade that RAM, and since it doesn't support external GPUs, could you really run this as your main machine? His conclusion, though, was mostly positive. Quote, spending a few days with the 2020 MacMiton. has shown me that it's a barn burner of a miniature desktop PC. It outperforms most Intel Macs in several benchmarks, runs apps reliably, and offers a fantastic day-to-day experience whether you're using it for web browsing and email or for creative editing and professional work. That potential will only grow when Apple inevitably raises the RAM's ceiling and hopefully

Starting point is 00:11:45 brings back those missing USB ports. The $699 starting price is tempting, but most people will be better off upgrading to 16 gigabytes of unified memory, which puts you at $899. Doubling the default 656 gigabytes storage makes that cost climb higher to $1,09.99. But even then, the price to performance ratio for the Mac Mini has never been better than with this changeover to Apple Silicon. Even if you ignore iPhone apps completely, the transition is off to an impressive start considering just how smoothly everything comes together. And just as ever, the Mac Mini's flexibility is what makes it special, end quote. Also at the verge, Nilai Patel tackled the MacBook Pro with the M1 chip, and he concurred.

Starting point is 00:12:26 Great performance, great display, great battery life. But again, why is RAM limited to 16 gigabytes? And also, this kind of got lost in the shuffle of the original announcement, but only two USB ports, only two ports, period, only two on a pro machine. Guess I'm going to be holding on to this last MacBook Pro with actual ports and SD card reader and HDMI, etc. until it literally is on its last legs. Anyway, Nilai's conclusion, quote,

Starting point is 00:12:56 There are two things to say about the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip. One, the M-1 and the work Apple has done to make a difficult processor transition seamless is a remarkable success. And two, this particular MacBook Pro doesn't necessarily seem like a worthwhile upgrade over the MacBook Air with an M-1 chip. Yes, it offers slightly better sustained performance and a little more battery life than the air, but I would happily trade back those seconds of faster rendering time on the pro for the hours of

Starting point is 00:13:23 frustration caused by the touchbar. And if you have much more serious performance needs, it seems likely that you might want more than two ports, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and only one external display. So this machine is a tweener, an excellent, fascinating tweener, but a tweener nonetheless, end quote. But on to the meat of the matter. Let's turn to Devendra Hardwar's impressions of the MacBook Air, which you remember you can only get with Apple Silicon these days. He says, it's incredibly fast. There's no fan noise, decent gaming performance for all of that, the usual great keyboard and trackpad,

Starting point is 00:14:00 but let's come back to the performance, quoting extensively now. Apple's new MacBook Air is stunningly fast. It's raring to go the instant you open its lid. Want to browse the web? Watch it load bloated sites faster than you've ever seen on a laptop. Want to play some games? Step back as it blows away every ultra-portable with no fan noise to get in the way. And if you need to take a break, don't worry, it's got enough battery life to last you all day.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Using the new MacBook Air is like stepping into a new world where we can demand much more from ultra-portables. MacOS Big Sur, the 17th edition of Apple's long-running desktop OS, is fully optimized for the M1. You can feel that while merely browsing around the finder and system menus. There's no hesitation when swapping between apps, as I mentioned. It wakes up the MacBook Air immediately when you open the lid. Again, I felt a very iOS-like sense of smoothness here. And during my testing, I never once encountered the dreaded spinning beach ball of death,

Starting point is 00:14:56 which I've grown all too used to seeing on my work-issued MacBook Pro from 2017. The M-1 also gives the MacBook Air something it's never had before. Decent gaming performance. Apple's system on a chip offers up to 8 GPU cores. The base MacBook Air only has 7, by the way. And from my testing, it blows away Intel's Integrated. graphics. I was able to run Apple arcade titles like The Pathless with ease at 60 frames per second. Everything ran as smoothly as on my gaming PC. I suppose that's not a huge surprise since Apple's A-series

Starting point is 00:15:28 chips have always delivered solid performance on iPhones and iPads, but it still feels genuinely strange to have an ultra-thin machine like the air running complex 3D titles without breaking a sweat. It even managed to play Fortnite at around 60 frames per second while running at 1,400 by 900 pixels with high graphics settings. Another shocker. The MacBook Air delivers this performance without a fan. It just relies on a heat sink and passive cooling like the iPad. The M1-powered MacBook Air feels like an enormous leap forward for Apple in every way.

Starting point is 00:15:59 But should you dump your current Mac for it right away? That's a bit more complex. While it's far faster than the last MacBook Air, that's still a solid machine that'll last you for years. If you've got a system that's several years old or you're looking to move over from an aging Windows laptop, the air is certainly compelling. While it starts at $999, I'd recommend going for the $1,249 model for 256 gigabytes of storage and an 8-core GPU. Both models come with 8 gigabytes of RAM, but you can upgrade to 16 gigabytes for an additional 200 bucks. That's worth springing for if you plan to use the air for serious work. One thing is clear now. With the M1 chip, Apple finally

Starting point is 00:16:38 has a way to truly differentiate Macs from Windows PCs. Now there's more of a reason. and to opt for a Mac beyond a slightly different OS and Apple's excellent build quality. The M1 chip makes the MacBook Air one of the fastest ultra-portables you can buy today. And even the biggest Windows fans will have a hard time denying that, end quote. Apparently, the Verge came very close to giving the Air a coveted 10 out of 10 review. Dieter Bone says it's the most impressive laptop he's used in years. Over at TechCrunch, Matthew Panzerino has this interesting section, quote, Much ado has been made of Apple including only 16 gigabytes of memory on these first M1 machines.

Starting point is 00:17:18 The fact of it, however, is that I have been unable to push them hard enough yet to feel any effect of this due to Apple's move to unified memory architecture. Moving RAM to the system on a chip means no upgradeability, you're stuck on 16 gigabytes forever, but it also means massively faster access to that memory by chips on the system that need it most. If I was a betting man, I'd say this was an intermediate step to eliminating the concept of RAM altogether. It's possible that a future, far future, this is the play for now, version of Apple's M-series chips, could end up supplying memory to each of the various chips from a vast pool that also serves as permanent storage. For now, though, what you've got is a finite but blazing fast pool of memory shared between the CPU cores,

Starting point is 00:18:05 GPU and other system-on-a-chip denizens like the secure enclave and neural engine, end quote. This all suggests, as we've been saying, that Apple jumped to their own chips not because they had to, but because this presents an opportunity they couldn't pass up. Apple has the potential, according to these reviews, with Apple Silicon, to redefine and run away with portable computing in the next decade. As Owen Williams, who is my go-to laptop nerd, tweeted, quote, These reviews have me very optimistic about how Apple's arm-based M1 chips are going to shake up laptops in a big way. I think given Apple's history with gaslighting people over faulty Macs in the last few years, it should make anyone hesitant to give them money for this first generation,

Starting point is 00:18:49 but it's exciting to see them trying again, end quote. So a reminder that we're recording our first ever office hours bonus episode tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, 6 p.m. Pacific. If you've ever wanted to ask Chris Messina a question about anything, this is pretty much an AMA with the goal of learning how he does what he does, how he works, his philosophy on what he thinks makes things like products work. Remember, Chris is a product guru, inventor of the hashtag. So if you ever wanted to pick the brain of someone who thinks deeply about how to design for success, this is your chance. Meeting link will be in the show notes today and tomorrow. Join us on the Zoom chat tomorrow night. And for regularly scheduled stuff,

Starting point is 00:19:38 I'll talk to you as per usual tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/17 – Amazon Pharmacy Aims To Conquer Another Huge Retail Sector

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.