Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/01 – Apple Watch… Out?

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 Wednesday. The first day of September 2021. I'm Brian McCullough.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Today is the Apple Watch redesign causing supply issues. A larger roadmap for the health features Apple is looking to add to the watch. Putting your driver's license in your Apple wallet is becoming a reality. LinkedIn abandoned stories. Facebook gets into fantasy sports. And wirecutter goes behind a paywall. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Watch out.

Starting point is 00:01:04 See what I did there. Lots of Apple Watch news this morning, and the first bit ain't good. A source is telling Debbie Wu and Mark German that Apple's upcoming watch is suffering production snags as manufacturers adjust to a new design, likely leading to supply constraints or shipment delays, quoting Bloomberg. The device is expected to have a larger screen alongside a faster processor, Bloomberg has reported. The upgrade has brought manufacturing challenges, according to the person who asked not to be identified because the situation isn't public. Niki reported earlier that production of the device has been delayed due to the complexity of the new watch. Manufacturers of the product began small-scale production last week,

Starting point is 00:01:44 but didn't get satisfactory output, Niki said. The new watches also have screen technology that bring that display closer to the cover glass using a different lamination technique, Bloomberg previously reported. That display layer may be causing some of the production woes, the person said, end quote. But following up on what German has mentioned recent, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is indeed planning to add health features, including a blood pressure monitor and thermometer in order to track fertility to the Apple Watch, but as German has intimated, don't expect these before 2022 at least. Quote, the fertility feature could be available as soon as next year,

Starting point is 00:02:25 along with potential improvements to its irregular heartbeat monitoring, and an upgrade to how it tracks sleep patterns, the people said, and the documents show. Beyond next year, Apple wants it. smartwatch to be able to detect sleep apnea, provide medical guidance when it senses low blood oxygen levels, and perhaps one day spot diabetes, according to the documents and some of the people. The plans for the watch underscore Apple's ambitions in health, which Chief Executive Tim Cook has said will be the company's quote, greatest contribution to mankind. Last year, the device brought in nearly $13 billion in sales, commanding 65% of the global smartwatch market

Starting point is 00:03:00 by revenue research firm strategy analytics estimates. challenge for Apple and other smartwatch makers is that the wrist is a poor place to measure vital signs like blood sugar levels. The watch's potential and its limits are evident in the new hypertension feature, according to people familiar with the feature and the documents. Apple previously said it cites on rolling out the feature next year, according to the people and documents. Today, blood pressure is commonly measured with inflatable cuffs wrapped around the upper arm. The sensors and smartwatches and smartphones can't replicate that. So Apple is studying a proxy that measures the speed of the wave a heartbeat sends through a person's arteries using sensors in the Apple Watch

Starting point is 00:03:40 according to the documents and the people. The version of the feature under discussion at Apple would try to show users how their blood pressure is trending, but without providing a baseline measure of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, according to people familiar with the plans. Some employees have raised questions to managers about how useful. Such a feature would be, the people said, though they cautioned that the feature is still in development and could change, end quote. Apple also announced today that Arizona and Georgia will be the first U.S. states to support adding official state-issued IDs to the Apple wallet in iOS 15, with six states expected to follow,

Starting point is 00:04:21 quoting TechCrunch. What started with boarding passes and venue tickets later became credit cards, subway tickets, and student IDs. Next on Apple's list to digitize our driver's licenses and state IDs, which it plans to support in its iOS 15 update expected out later this year. said today it is so far secured two states, Arizona and Georgia, to bring digital driver's license and state IDs to the wallet. Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow, but a timeline for rolling out wasn't given. Apple said in June that it would begin supporting digital licenses and IDs and that the TSA would be the first agency to begin accepting a digital license from an iPhone at several airports, since only a state ID is required

Starting point is 00:05:05 for traveling by air domestically within the United States. The TSA will allow you to present your digital wallet by tapping it on an identity reader. Apple says the feature is secure and doesn't require handing over or unlocking your phone. The digital license and ID data is stored on your iPhone, but a driver's license must be verified by the participating state. That has to happen at scale and speed to support millions of drivers and travelers while preventing fake IDs from making it through. Apple still has not said much about how the digital ID technology works or what data the state obtains, as part of the process to enroll a digital license. Apple is working on a new security verification feature that takes selfies to validate the user. It's not to say these systems aren't inherently problematic,

Starting point is 00:05:49 but there are privacy questions that Apple will have to address down the line, end quote. Sorry to hit you with yet another Apple story, but this is how the chips fell for us this morning. Apple is apparently barring staff for making a Slack channel around pay equity. Apple says it is because the channel is not work-related. despite the existence of other Slack channels relating to things like pets and jokes, quoting the verge. Employment attorney Vincent P. White says that invoking the slack terms may simply be an excuse to block discussions of workplace pay disparities since doing so outright would violate labor law. Discussing pay equity is a protected activity under federal state and local law, says White. Everyone agrees on that. For them to try and impair employees' ability to discuss pay equity and diversity in the workplace,

Starting point is 00:06:42 is a clear-cut act of retaliation, end quote. Pay equity has been a hot topic among Apple employees over the past few months. The company has shut down multiple employee surveys aimed at gathering data on how much workers make. One survey started by Apple engineer, Cher Scarlett, has seemingly been allowed to stay up. An early analysis of the results showed a 6% wage gap between the salaries of men and women who participated, end quote. I'm noting this story today because I wanted to mention these tweets from Dare Obisancho, quote, The thing about Apple banning multiple discussions about pay equity among employees is that it's a smoking gun because their HR must know the data makes them look bad.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Most big techs are savvy about paying people equally at the same level, so this is wild. The typical pay equity issue at major tech companies is promotion velocity, where junior ranks are full of underrepresented folks, while leadership leans towards particular demographics. That Apple is scared of junior folks sharing their salaries is quite telling. Unlike Apple, there are other huge tech companies where this is commonplace and incredibly mundane, end quote. So I guess we've found the natural law limit for this product. LinkedIn is abandoning its stories format at the end of September and is told advertisers to adjust their ad campaigns accordingly. Quoting the verge, part of the reason for the shutdown is that LinkedIn learned

Starting point is 00:08:13 users just didn't want disappearing video. In developing stories, we assume people wouldn't want informal videos attached to their profile and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting. Liz Lee, senior director of product at LinkedIn, said, turns out you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way, and that showcase both your personality and expertise, end quote. LinkedIn's move follows Twitter's shutdown of fleets. It's stories like product in July. Like LinkedIn, Twitter observed, users didn't respond to ephemeral video in the way it had wanted. We hoped fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. Ilya Brown, Twitter's vice president of product said on

Starting point is 00:08:54 Twitter's blog, but in the time since we introduced fleets to everyone, we haven't seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with fleets like we hoped, end quote. The two shutdowns could signal a broader pullback from ephemeral video products among social media companies. However, it seems unlikely that Snapchat or Instagram will be giving up on their stories products anytime soon, end quote. True that, but at least we have now some conclusive evidence that you can't just slap stories on everything. Facebook says it is launching Facebook Fantasy games in the U.S. and Canada, available for free on the Facebook app, quoting TechCrunch. Some games are described as simpler versions of the

Starting point is 00:09:44 traditional fantasy sports games already on the market, while others allow users to make predictions associated with popular TV series like Survivor or The Bachelorette. The first game to launch is pick and play sports in partnership with whistle sports, where fans get points for correctly predicting the winner of a big game, the points scored by a top player, or other events that unfold during the match. Players can also earn bonus points for building a streak of correct predictions over several days. This game is arriving today. In the months ahead, it will be followed by other games in sports, TV, and pop culture, including Fantasy Survivor, where players choose a set of castaways from the popular CBS TV show to join their fantasy team and Fantasy The Bachelorette, where fans will pick a

Starting point is 00:10:28 group of men from the suitors vying for The Bachelorette's heart, and get points based on their actions and events that take place during the show. Other upcoming sports-focused games include MLB Home Run picks, where players pick the team that they think will hit the most home runs, and La Liga winning streak, where fans predict the team that will win that day. In addition to top players being featured on leaderboards, games have a social component for those who want to play with friends. Players can create their own fantasy league with friends to compete with one another or against other fans, either publicly or privately. League members can compare scores with each other and will have a place where they can share picks, reactions, and comments. This league area resembles a private group on

Starting point is 00:11:06 Facebook as it offers its own Compose Box for posting only to members and its own dedicated feed. However, the page is designed to support groups with specific buttons to play or view the leaderboard, among others. The addition of fantasy games could help Facebook increase the time users spend on its app at a time when the company is facing significant competition in social, namely from TikTok. According to App Annie, the average monthly time spent per user in TikTok grew faster than other top social apps in 2020, including by 70% in the U.S., surpassing Facebook, end quote. Reminds me of when Yahoo and MSN and AOL were all competing to add time suckers to their portals to keep people on page and serving up banner ads. Of course, Yahoo actually turned

Starting point is 00:11:51 its fantasy sports thing into quite a business, but the point is, everything old is new again on a long enough timeline. You could argue that this is more of a media story than a tech story, Lord knows that for the last decade or so, any time I needed to buy a gadget that I didn't already know exactly what I wanted, I turned to wirecutter. A few years ago, you might remember that the New York Times bought Wirecutter, and now The Times has announced that it is adding a paywall to Wirecutter, starting after users read 10 stories a month,

Starting point is 00:12:26 charging $5 a month or $40 a year, but keeping the site free for New York Times premium digital subscribers, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Starting Wednesday, readers can purchase a standalone wirecutter subscription for $5 every four weeks or $40 annually. Those who already pay for the Times premium digital subscriptions or home delivery will continue to get unlimited access to wirecutter with no change to the subscription's price. At launch, readers will get nine free wirecutter articles a month before being asked to pay for a subscription on the 10th article. Only a small proportion of Wirecutter's readership currently reads more than 10 articles a month, said Linda Lee, Wirecutter's general manager, a small percentage of users visit the site more than 50 times a month.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Ms. Lee said that the site will experiment with the free article threshold. The Times will make some Wirecutter articles free periodically, quote, if they provide strong public service, said a Times spokeswoman. For instance, Wirecutter's coverage of air purifiers will be in front of the paywall when the subscription product launches amid the wildfires in the Western U.S., the spokeswoman said. Up until now, Wirecutter has generated revenue primarily through affiliate partnerships with online sellers including Amazon. When a consumer follows a link on the site to purchase a product, Wirecutter receives a commission on the sale. Those affiliate relationships will continue

Starting point is 00:13:44 providing a way to monetize non-subscribers. The Times move to generate subscription revenue for Wirecutter is similar to what the publisher has done with its popular cooking and games products. Both are also included in the Times' all-digital access subscription, which costs $25 every four weeks. The Times basic digital access subscription, which excludes those products, cost $17 every four weeks, end quote. Quoting the great Rafat Ali on Twitter, somewhere founding digital profits at Consumer Reports are laughing reading this, the original subscription review magazine and then cite, end quote. Sources say Google is developing arm-based chips for laptops and tablets that will run on Chrome OS, set to launch around 2023, quoting Niki Asia.

Starting point is 00:14:37 Google is developing its own central processors for its notebook and tablet computers, the latest sign that major tech players see in-house chip development as key to their competitiveness. The U.S. Internet giant plans to roll out the CPUs for laptops and tablets, which run on the company's Chrome operating system in or around 2023. Three sources with knowledge of the matter told NK. Asia. Google is also ramping up its efforts to build mobile processors for its pixel smartphones and other devices after announcing it will use in-house processor chips for the first time

Starting point is 00:15:05 in its upcoming Pixel 6 series, they said. Google's growing focus on developing its own chips comes as global rivals pursue a similar strategy to differentiate their offerings. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, Baidu, and Alibaba are all racing to build their own semiconductors to power their cloud services and electronic products. Separately, the company has high hopes for the pixel 6 range and has asked suppliers to prepare 50% more production capacity for the handsets compared with the pre-pandemic level in 2019, two people told Nika Asia. Google shipped more than 7 million pixel phones in 2019 its highest figure ever, but shipped just 3.7 million phones the following year as COVID ravaged the world,

Starting point is 00:15:43 according to research company IDC. Google told several suppliers in recent meetings that it sees potential for massive growth opportunities in the global market because it is the only U.S. smartphone maker building handsets using the Android operating system, end quote. And finally today, Microsoft this morning announced an online-only surface hardware event for September 22nd, where updated Surface Duos and laptops are expected, quoting the verge. Leaked images of Microsoft's upcoming Surface Duo 2 device appeared online in July, and we're expecting to see an official announcement of this Android-powered dual-screen hardware on September 22nd. The leaked images suggest that the biggest change will be a triple camera

Starting point is 00:16:26 system, complete with telephoto, ultra-wide angle, and standard lenses. The Surface Duo 2 is also rumor to include Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 processor, 5G support, and an NFC chip for contactless payments. Alongside the Surface Duo 2, Microsoft is rumored to be launching a successor to the Surface Book 3. Windows Central previously reported that Microsoft might not name it the Surface Book 4, though. Instead, it's likely to be a Surface laptop pro or something similar. That's because Microsoft is reportedly redesigning its high-end laptop to switch to a non-detachable 14-inch display. A Windows 11 launch on October 5th wouldn't be complete without an update to the Surface Pro lineup 2. Microsoft launched its refreshed Surface Pro 7 plus earlier this year, but it was only for businesses.

Starting point is 00:17:11 We're hoping to see a more refined Surface Pro design that takes advantage of the latest Windows 11 features. Microsoft's teaser image even includes a Surface Pro, end quote. All righty then, the tribe has spoken by a margin of 84% to 60% to 60%. 16%, at least at the time of this recording, Reed Hastings has won your voting, and Evan Spiegel has been voted off Entrepreneur Island. The way our episode, when we eventually record it, will work, is we'll go through each matchup, matchup by matchup, and we'll only discuss the loser each time. So the first person we'll talk about will be Evan, evaluating his profile as an entrepreneur, the diamond hands he has for not selling out to Zuckerberg all those years ago,

Starting point is 00:18:05 product innovation of ephemeral messaging and stories and the like. And then we'll discuss Reed Hastings when and if he ever gets knocked out himself. This way, we'll be able to do a roundtable discussion on each of the various entrepreneurs, the relative virtues and career of each person in turn. So who might read Face in the quarterfinals? It will be a winner of today's matchup, which you can vote on right now. and that matchup is Jeff Bezos of Amazon versus Jack Ma of Alibaba. Go vote.

Starting point is 00:18:40 I hopefully will have, remember to put a link in the show notes to take you there, but also it should be pinned to the top of the podcast Twitter profile, which is at TechMeme podcast. Check it out, vote. Leave your reasons for your vote in the comments if you so choose. And please retweet today's vote so we can get a larger sample size, even from people that don't even listen to this podcast. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/01 – Apple Watch… Out?

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