Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, Mar. 27, 2018 - Apple's New iPad

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Apple's new iPad, Arizona bans Uber test cars, Zuckerberg won't talk to Parliament but might talk to Congress, Foxconn buys Belkin, Apple goes to Hollywood, and will the streaming explosion revive piracy? Stories from: @koblin, @KarlBodeLink: Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending? (New York Times)Link: The Rise In Streaming Video Exclusives Could Annoy Consumers, Driving Them Back To Piracy (TechDirt) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Meme Ride Home for Tuesday, March 27th, 2018. Today, Apple's new iPads. Arizona bans Uber test cars.

Zuckerberg won't talk to Parliament but might talk to Congress. Foxcon buys Belkin. Apple goes to Hollywood and will the streaming explosion revive digital piracy. Here's what happened today in the world of tech. Today in Chicago, Apple held an event where, it refreshed its 9.7-inch iPad lineup. The headline news is that these lower-end models now support Apple's pencil stylus,

which previously only worked with the high-end iPad Pro models. The new tablet also has touch ID, an HD FaceTime camera, an 8 megapixel rear camera, Apple's A10 fusion chip, and the expected 10 hours of battery life. The updated iPads are available in Apple stores right now, in silver, space gray, and a new gold finish. The $329 base level price point is the same as it was last year, but Apple is offering it to schools for the reduced price of $299.

These new iPads are not exactly the shot across the bow of Google's Chromebooks that some people expected, because it turns out if you trick out even the base model iPad with an iPad pencil and a keyboard, you're going to be looking at close to. $450 all in. But this was very much an education-focused event. Apple invited teachers to sit in the

audience and invited several on stage to discuss using iPads in a school setting. So a lot of the other announcements were very much geared towards iPads as education tools. Apple unveiled a schoolwork app to let teachers assign work and track student progress.

It's likely coming in June so teachers can spend the summer figuring out how to integrate it into their classrooms. Apple also announced a new tool set for developers called Class Kit, which will allow them to create apps to integrate with the schoolwork app. And Apple also announced a free curriculum called Everyone Can Create, which is designed to make it easier for teachers to integrate drawing, music, filmmaking, or photography into lesson plans, all tasks, of course, that could be done using iPads. And Apple said it was allowing student Apple accounts that are opened through

schools to now get 200 gigabytes of iCloud storage for free. The better to store all of that drawing, music, and filmmaking. For the rest of us, of course, the free tier of iCloud storage is only five gigabytes. Apple also debuted new versions of iWork with Apple pencil integration and built-in book authoring tools. Users can now add annotations and drawings to keynote, numbers, and pages documents just by writing on the screen. Any sketches you make will not just be sitting as some sort of overlay on the page, but will be attached to the words around them.

And finally, Logitech took the stage during the event as well to announce a $49 crayon accessory to the iPad, like the Apple Pencil, but cheaper. the crayon promises the pencils low lag, tilt support, and sub-pixel precision when drawing on screen. Logitech also announced a $99 rugged combo two case for the iPad that includes a detachable keyboard and a slot for your stylus. This is an attempt to make the iPad into a passable laptop replacement, with the added bonus of making it hopefully more durable in a classroom setting. The state of Arizona has officially suspended Uber from testing autonomous vehicles on its roads. This comes on the heels of last week's fatal crash involving a self-driving test vehicle in Tempe, Arizona. Uber had suspended its autonomous vehicle testing in the wake of the incident, but now it is barred from resuming testing even if it wanted to.

The ban was announced in a formal letter from Arizona Governor Doug Deucy to Uber. quote, as governor, my top priority is public safety. Improving public safety has always been the emphasis of Arizona's approach to autonomous vehicle testing. And my expectation is that public safety is also the top priority for all who operate this technology in the state of Arizona. The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation, end quote.

Uber had been testing self-driving vehicles in Arizona. Arizona since 2016. The state had been unusually accommodating in terms of regulating the technology. Uber's test vehicles had already been kicked out of California because Uber had refused to obtain the required permits from the state. Over the weekend, the New York Times had reported that Uber's self-driving program had been having trouble meeting internal goals in terms of performance of the automation technology. Waymo, Google's self-driving project, reports that its cars can go nearly 5,600 miles on average before requiring human intervention. And General Motors reports that its vehicles require human intervention on an average of only 1,200 miles. Uber's autonomous vehicles, in comparison, required intervention from their human safety monitors every 13 miles or so, and was apparently struggling to make even that average.

According to the times, Uber's cars were having trouble especially in construction zones and next to tall vehicles like semi-trucks. According to the internal company documents seen by the Times, Uber had been playing catch-up with its self-driving tests recently. It had taken roughly a year for Uber's test vehicles to log one million miles on real-world roads, and then Uber tallied its second million miles,

a mere 100 days later and a third million even faster than that. Because in Arizona, Uber had been operating in what the Times called a, quote, regulatory vacuum. It did not have to report to the state on how the cars were actually performing. In other states like California, self-driving testers are required to report to the state regularly on statistics like the number of interventions the vehicles require. Arizona's Governor Ducey had originally welcomed Uber to his state, once issuing a statement that said, quote, California may not want you, but we do. And later, the governor tweeted of California's requirements to report performance statistics, quote, this is what overregulation looks like. Matt Coleman and Uber spokesman told the Times, quote, as we develop self-driving technology, safety is our primary concern every step of the way.

We're heartbroken by what happened this week, and our cars remain grounded. We continue to assist investigators in any way that we can. Parliament in the United Kingdom had requested that Mark Zuckerberg personally appear to answer questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but Facebook says he won't go. Instead, the company offered to send chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer and chief product officer Chris Cox instead. Both men report direct. to Zuckerberg. Rebecca Simon, Facebook's head of public policy in the UK, responded to calls from

conservative politician Damien Collins that Zuckerberg speak to his select committee looking into the incident. Simon wrote to Collins, quote, Facebook fully recognizes the level of public and parliamentary interest in these issues and support your belief that these issues must be addressed at the most senior levels of the company by those in an authoritative position to answer your questions. As such, Mr. Zuckerberg has personally asked one of his deputies to make themselves available to give evidence in person to the committee. M.P. Collins responded with a statement saying, quote, Facebook has got many questions to answer that their executives have failed to answer in

previous appearances before our committee. As Mark Zuckerberg's deputy, we hope that Chris Cox has the sufficient authority and operational responsibility to concretely answer these questions. Given the seriousness of these issues, we still believe that Mark Zuckerberg is the right person to give evidence and would like him to confirm if he will make himself available to the committee. He stated in interviews that if he is the right person to appear, he will appear. We think he is the right person and we look forward to hearing from him, end quote. The Washington Post is also reporting that the Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled in April 10 hearing on the, quote, future of data privacy and social media,

and they want officials from Google and Twitter to testify along with Facebook. So far, there is no word on if any of the companies would agree to appear. But late today, CNN.com was reporting that, according to Facebook sources, Mark Zuckerberg has, quote, come to terms with the fact that he will have to testify

before Congress within a matter of weeks, and Facebook is currently planning the strategy, for his testimony, end quote. This has not yet officially been confirmed by Facebook. Foxcon, the company best known as the contract manufacturer of iPhones, announced this morning that it had reached an agreement to buy U.S. consumer electronics maker Belkin for $866 million. Specifically, Foxcon's subsidiary FIT Hong Teng would be the purchasing entity.

Foxcon has for a long time been making noises about diversifying its business beyond manufacturing devices for Apple and other gadget developers. With this announcement, Foxcon says it expects to establish a new smart home business by combining Belkin's existing lynxys and Wemo businesses with existing FIT Hong Tang assets. Belkin is perhaps best known in the U.S. for its lynxys routers and various iPhone and iPad accessories. In recent years, Apple had outsourced many ancillary products to Belkin, including adapters, cables, and charging devices. Now, this deal will surely face scrutiny from the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment, which earlier this month blocked Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm on national security grounds. It certainly seems like similar concerns about a company that makes networking peripherals would arise, since there would be an obvious vector for introducing spying or eavesdropping technologies into such devices.

Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan and is the largest private employer in China. Mike Dutas speculated on Twitter, quote, Trump is obviously going to reject this deal via a tweet within a week. And Bloomberg's Tim Culpin noted on Twitter that Foxconn is willing to pay quite dearly for Belkin. The purchase price represents 185 times earnings and 15 times assets. He also noted that Belkin's margins were a puny one-half of 1% and it lost money last year. It's a story from a couple days ago, but I thought you would find this interesting for context, if nothing else. We know that Netflix invests a ton of money to produce video content, reportedly $8 billion this year, in fact.

And we know that Amazon into a lesser extent. extent Hulu have been doing the same. There were 487 scripted shows released last year, and there will be more than 500 this year. But you might not be aware, unless you caught their recent Planet of the Apps show, which I don't think anyone really did, that Apple is jumping into this game as well, and in a very big way. The New York Times is John Koblin has a piece up describing Apple's content ambitions called Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will its story have a happy ending? In Culver City, California, the former home of the studio MGM, Apple is reportedly building a new

128,000 square foot headquarters for its new entertainment division. Apple began talking to content producers last year, saying that it had a budget of about a billion dollars to throw around, and since last October, Apple has made deals for 12 projects, nine of which were straight to series green lights. Among the talent that will be producing shows for Apple are Reese Witherspoon, Stephen Spielberg, Damien Chazel, M. Knight-Shammelon, Jennifer Aniston, Octavia Spencer, and Kristen Wigg. Apple also hired veteran TV producers Zach Van Amberg and Jamie Ehrlich from Sony Pictures Television, where they made their names with shows like Breaking Bad and The Crown.

According to the piece, quote, producers and entertainment executives who have met recently with Apple executives said the company has been leaning towards programming in keeping with its bright, optimistic brand identity. In other words, it seems possible that Apple will shy away from projects that are gratuitously dark or heavy on social issues.

Reese Witherspoon told the times earlier this year, quote, Apple just gets it. They get our vision and they just stepped up and they really wanted to be in business with us in a big way, end quote. Witherspoon is reportedly producing three different shows for Apple. It's unclear exactly when any of these shows will be available for consumption, though sources suggested to the Times that Apple was targeting between March and summer of next year. It's also unclear how exactly we will be able to watch these shows.

The Times speculates that they might drop on Apple's TV app, but it's unclear if they're not sure if they will be able to watch these shows. It's unclear if they would be free to watch for certain users or if they would be behind a paywall for everyone. But Apple certainly seems to be committed to this move at a recent panel at South by Southwest. Apple's Eddie Q, who heads up Apple's original programming group, said, quote, We're all in. We're completely all in. So, seemingly, everybody is trying to ram a hundred different TV shows down your throat. If you already thought that there was too much TV to even keep up with,

Stay tuned because there's plenty more coming. Remember, Disney and a whole slew of other brands are preparing to launch what are known as over-the-top streaming services over the coming years. So get ready to pony up $9.99 a month for half a dozen things if you want to catch every show you're interested in. And over at TechDirt, Carl Bodie wondered if that might become a problem for the content industry overall. In a really in-depth analysis, Bodie speculates that having so many different shows, exclusive to dozens of different platforms, might lead to the sort of complexity fatigue that could drive consumers back to digital piracy. Boty writes, quote, once you've cordoned off each broadcaster and content creator's product into countless walled silos, each requiring their own subscription, you've not only countered the biggest benefit of the streaming revolution, lower prices, greater, flexibility, you've opened the door to customers getting frustrated and returning to piracy. He goes on to say, quote, customers might find piracy a better, simpler alternative if they're

forced to subscribe to 30 different services at $8 to $20 a month per pop just to access the movies and TV shows they're looking for. The article in question is titled, The Rise in Streaming Video Exclusives could annoy consumers driving them back to piracy. And there's a link to it in the show. notes. That's all for today. I'm Brian McCullough at Brian MCC on Twitter. I had the exceptional help today, as every day, of the techmeme.com editors, but especially today, as they organized all the Apple News and the brilliant way that they always do. There will be news again tomorrow, of course, so we'll organize it all again and be back with another podcast. Thanks for listening.