Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/15 – Charging A Smartphone In 17 Minutes?

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Xiaomi’s new flagship phone can apparently charge in just 17 minutes. Why Apple was so coy about the performance of its latest chips yesterday. The SEC has charged App Annie with securities fraud. And Canva is becoming a mega unicorn to watch, even as its founders are pledging to give a third of the company away. Sponsors: BankNovo.com/ride Postie.com/techmeme Links: Xiaomi announces 11T Pro with 120W fast charging (The Verge) Apple releasing iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 on September 20 (9to5Mac) iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro feature dual eSIM support for the first time (9to5Mac) Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In (SemiAnalysis.substack.com) Solana Has Been Down for Hours Due to ‘Resource Exhaustion’ (Decrypt) SEC charges App Annie with securities fraud in $10 million settlement (Protocol) Canva Raises At $40 Billion Valuation — Its Founders Are Pledging Away Most Of Their Wealth (Forbes) Microsoft accounts can now go fully passwordless (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 TechMeme right home for Wednesday, September 15th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Zhaummi's new flagship phone can apparently charge in just 17 minutes. Why Apple was so coy about the performance of its latest chips yesterday. The SEC has charged App Annie with securities fraud. And Canva is becoming a mega unicorn to watch,

even as its founders are pledging to give away a significant portion of the company. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Did you not get your fill of smartphone releases yesterday? Well, how about this? Zhaummy launched its flagship 11T series today, which is starting at a price tag of 649 euros. And that would be news in and of itself, but this launch includes the 11T Pro, which has 120 watt fast charging, which Zhaummi claims allows you to get 100% charge in just 17 minutes. Every year, I keep waiting for Apple to deliver some sort of meaningful breakthrough in battery, either fast charging or battery life overall that will make the iPhone stand out from the competition.

And they never really do. They never do that. And I still think they should announce unlimited photo and video storage in the cloud for free forever. But they never do that either. Back to the 11T, quoting the Verge. Xiaomi has launched its 11T series, the headline of which is the 11T Pro. and it's previously announced 120-watt hypercharge fast-charging system. The phone has a 5,000-m-amp hour battery,

and Jami says the bundled 120-watt charger can fill it from 0 to 100% in just 17 minutes. A 10-minute charge will get you to 72% meanwhile. That's even faster than the 120-watt Mi-10 Ultra Zhaomi released in China last year, and the 11T Pro is coming to Europe and beyond. The 11T Pro is entirely different phone. to the Me 11 flagship released earlier this year. It has a different boxier design with a plastic back, though the specs are similar. There's still a Snapdragon 888 processor and a 108 megapixel camera.

The screen is a 6.67 inch 120 hertz, 180p, OLED panel with no curves on the side, unlike the Me 11. Xiaomi is also announcing two lower end phones in the 11T range, neither of which have the 120-watt fast-charging system. The 11T has a Media Tech Demensity-200 ultra-processor and 67-watt fast-charging that fills the battery in 37 minutes, while the 11-Light 5G&E has a Snapdragon 778 and a 4250-mph-amp hour battery that Jaumi says fills in, quote, no time, which may not be a scientific measurement, end quote. As often happens after Apple events, today I do have a few bits and bobs to pick up from around the margins. First up, yes, Apple did in fact announce that iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 will

release on September 20th with updates to FaceTime, notifications, and more. Actually, a reminder of what that more is from 9 to 5 Mac, quote, even though some features such as SharePlay will be missing from the first version of iOS 15, there are still a slew of notable new features. One of the most notable changes is something called Focus, which allows you to set custom preferences for notifications and home screens. Another new feature in iOS 15 is the all-new weather application, which allows you to view full-screen weather maps, showing precipitation, air quality, and temperature. The weather app design also now adjusts to show the most important weather information for that location and includes new maps modules, an updated 10-day forecast, and new graphical weather data.

15 also includes an all-new design for Safari, which went through multiple revisions through the beta testing period. Quote, the streamlined tab bar takes up less room on the page and floats slightly above the bottom of the screen where it's easier to reach. The bar seamlessly moves out of the way as you scroll and appears again with a tap, Apple explains, end quote. Also, the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro are apparently the first iPhones to support dual e-sim, expanding on support for e-sim and regular sim in previous iPhones, quoting 9 to 5 Mac again, but from a different post, quote, Apple introduced e-sim support on iPhone with iPhone 10R and iPhone 10S in 2018. However, while you can use a regular sim and an e-sim simultaneously, there was no way to use two

e-sims simultaneously until now. iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro feature dual e-sim support for the first time. The new capability was confirmed by Apple on the iPhone 13 Spex webpage. There, Apple says that iPhone 13 modules support dual sim using both regular sim and e-sim and dual e-sim as the company calls it. If you check the webpage of the iPhone 12 or previous generations, only combined dual sim support is mentioned, end quote. Also, I did want to correct something that I got wrong. yesterday, pre-orders for the iPhone 13 lineup begin Friday, September 17th, with delivery a week later on September 24th. But also yesterday, I noted that Apple kept saying its various chip and processor upgrades were X percent better than unnamed competing smartphones, when usually they like to

tout how improved a given chip is from a previous generation Apple chip. It turns out that that is because in A-1st, Apple reported no CPU gains for the A-15 chip, likely because of the engineer exodus to companies like Nuvia and Rivas, quoting the semi-analysis substack. It appears Apple has not changed the CPU much this generation. Semi-analysis believes that the next-generation core was delayed out of 2021 into 2022 due to CPU engineer resource problems. In 2019, Nuvia was founded and later acquired.

by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion. Apple's chief CPU architect Gerard Williams, as well as over 100 other Apple engineers left to join this firm. More recently, semi-analysis broke the news about Rivas, a new high-performance chip startup, which includes many senior Apple engineers. The brain drain continues and impacts will be more apparent as time moves on. As Apple once drained resources out of Intel and others through the industry, the reverse now seems to be happening. We believe Apple had to delay the next generation CPU core due to all the personnel turnover Apple has been experiencing. Instead of a new CPU core, they are using a modified version of last year's core. One of these modifications is related to the CPU core's MMU.

This work was being done for the upcoming colloquially named M1X generation of Mac chips. Part of the reason for this change is related to larger memory sizes and virtualization features slash support. In addition, there may be other small changes as well, but we need hardware. in the hand to analyze that. We also aren't sure if Avalanche and Blizzard are the next generation cores or the current modified Firestorm and Ice Storm cores. Regardless of the Paltry CPU gains and potential core architecture delays, Apple is still the leader in performance per watt. With Intel design teams starting to get back on track, AMD, executing almost flawlessly, and Qualcomm

coming in soon like a hammer with Nuvia cores, we aren't sure if this lead will be sustained. The A-11 to A-12 generation was seen as Apple starting to asymptote out on gains with only a 15% gain, and the A-13-A-14 looked even more weak with 8.3% gains. But now with no CPU gains at all, let's cross our fingers and hope the A-16 brings a large architectural change, end quote. Also, by the way, Apple Watcher Steve Trouton-Smith tweeted this, quote, There's a reason Apple didn't talk about the Apple Watch Series 7 CPU, year, and it's because it's the exact same as last year's Series 6. In fact, it doesn't even get a new model number. It's effectively just a chassis tweak, end quote. Solana, the rival blockchain network

to Ethereum, is back up and running after suffering a network outage for around 17 hours yesterday, which its engineers say was caused by network exhaustion? That's a new one on me, quoting decrypt. Solana Lab's CEO Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted out to network validators that it's quote, beta time and implored them to join Solana's official Discord server, apparently to coordinate the potential response. In a Twitter reply, Yakovenko told a user that the issue is due to overwhelming transaction volume from bots during an initial decentralized exchange offering or IDO for a project. An IDO is a type of public token sales similar to an ICO, only it happens on a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange rather than a centralized platform.

According to Yaakovenko, bots were, quote, flooding the network with 300,000 transactions per second, causing problems for Salana's transaction cues. When a user replied asking Salana to disallow first-come-first-serve idea launches in the future, Yaakovenko demurred, quote, nah, just need to fix the bugs, part of life, he wrote, end quote. Yeah, but has something similar ever happened to Ethereum? If you're claiming to be better than Ethereum, this is not a good look, right? As Mark Vander Kreece tweeted, quote, LOL, you call yourself an ETH killer, but then you get close to killing yourself.

It also shows how centralized Solana is. They can literally decide to stop forks and restart the network. Try that with Bitcoin, end quote. The SEC has charged App Annie, who we often turn to when we want to learn about app usage and popularity, with securities fraud, accusing the company of, quote, engaging in deceptive practices, end quote, and misrepresenting its data. App Annie will pay a $10 million settlement, quoting protocol. According to the SEC, the company, which sells estimates on app downloads, usage, and revenue, assured app businesses that the performance data they shared with App Annie would only be used in an

anonymized way and run through the algorithm to generate performance estimates. But the SEC accuses App Annie and its former CEO and Chairman Bertrand Schmidt of reneging on that promise and using actual performance data to tweak its estimate models between 2014 and 2018. Then the SEC alleges the company sold that confidential data to trading firms and misled those customers into thinking that the data was compliant with federal securities laws. Quote, here App Annie and Schmidt lied to companies about how their confidential data was being used and then not only sold the manipulated estimates to their trading firm customers, but also encouraged that. them to trade on those estimates, often touting how closely they correlated with the company's

true performance and stock prices. Gerbier S. Grewell, Director of the SEC's Enforcement Division, said in a statement, in addition to the $10 million settlement, Schmidt is required to pay $300,000 and is barred from serving as a director or officer of any public company for three years. App Annie said Tuesday that it had made, quote, a number of material changes in recent years, including appointing a new CEO and a head of compliance. In a statement to protocol, while Theater Krantz, App Annie's current CEO, used the opportunity to call for stricter regulation of the entire industry. Quote, many businesses may be unknowingly leveraging data reliant on confidential public company information without explicit consent, which we believe puts companies using

digital slash mobile market data at significant risk, Krantz said. It is our opinion that the entire alternative data space needs to be regulated, end quote. If Stripe is the top of the heap these days in terms of the current unicorn scene. I guess SpaceX is also in there at a strong second as well, but keep your eyes on Canva. The collaborative graphic design app has raised a $200 million round, led by T.Rowe price at a $40 billion valuation, which again is news in and of itself, but so is this. Canva's founders have pledged to give away 30% of Canva's equity to charitable causes, quoting Forbes. The round led by T-Roe Price with Franklin Templeton, Sequoia, Bessemer Venture Partners, Green Oaks Capital, Dragonnear, Blackbird, Felices, and Airtree, all participating more than doubles

the Australian design software company's valuation in five months. Canva's already on a level few startups have reached, not just for a valuation second only to stripe on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies. Long, profitable, and cash flow positive, Canva continues to more than double in sales, the company says. on pace to reach a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate by December of 2021, the vast majority of that recurring subscription revenue. Moving in the right direction, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins says matter-of-factly, profitable, doubling growth and with hundreds of millions of revenue, why bother raising at all? One reason, says Perkins, is to keep doubling headcount, which reached

2,000 this year. Perkins says Canva received 180,000 job applications over the past 12 months. other could be acquisitions, sources close to Canva ad. Then there's Perkins' own lifelong mission for Canva, one for which she thinks it's worth it to play it safe. Originally known as a tool for amateur designers or small businesses, Canvas's freemium software is used by more than 60 million monthly users. More than 7 billion designs have been created in Canva to date, the company says, with 120 new designs each second. But more than 500,000 paying teams now use Canva 2, including companies like American Airlines, CBRE, Intel, Kimberly Clark, and Zoom for everything from social media assets to sales and human resources presentations, or in the case of Live Nation, assets

for upcoming rock concerts. The new funding dramatically increases the value of Canva's founder's stakes in the business, previously valued at $15 billion in April. Forbes estimates that Perkins and Oberich each own about 18% of Canva and Adams 9%. At a $40 billion valuation, that means Perkins and Oberact each hold stakes valued at $6.5 billion, while Adams' stake is valued at $3.2 billion. Forbes deducts 10% for private company holdings. But already on the record that they didn't plan to hoard such wealth, Perkins and Oberact are now pledging to give away 30% of Canva, the vast majority of their stakes, to the Canva Foundation to be used for charitable causes. If the whole thing was about building wealth, that would be the most uninspiring thing I could possibly imagine, Perkins tells Forbes.

It has felt strange when people refer to us as billionaires as it has never felt like our money. We've always felt that we're purely custodians of it, she added in a blog post. Canva first plans to pilot its charitable giving through a $10 million donation to non-profit give directly to distribute two vulnerable families in Southern Africa. It plans to ramp up its giving after that. It's all part of what Perkins has long described as a, quote, two-step plan for maximum impact, quote, become one of the most valuable companies in the world. and do the best we can do, end quote. On the first count, Canva's well on its way, with no shortage of

investors looking to pony up money even at evaluation more typical of a public company. Perkins says she has no current interest in an IPO. On the second, Canva joined the Pledge 1% movement in the past to donate time, money, equity, and resources to charity. The startup works with 60,000 schools today and 130,000 nonprofits. Canva has also committed to plant one tree for each print order it services, a tally that's reached 2 million to date, end quote. And finally, remember how Microsoft wants to do away with passwords? Well, today's the day, because starting now, Microsoft will let users access accounts without a password by using Microsoft Authenticator, Windows Hello, a security key,

or a verification code, quoting the verge. It's a relatively simple process to remove your password, too. You'll need to have the Microsoft Authenticator mobile app installed and linked to your personal Microsoft account. Once that's complete, you can visit account.microsoft.com and choose advanced security options and then enable passwordless accounts in the additional security section. You then approve the change from your authenticator app and you'll be password free. You can always reverse the change and add a password back to your Microsoft account in the future, end quote. So the hashtag World Cup of Entrepreneurs is over and we have a winner,

or we will have a winner about four hours after this episode posts. So if you're listening to this right away, you still have a chance to get your vote in over at the TechMeme podcast Twitter account, but chances are you're listening to this later and we'll already have had a winner. Steve Jobs is currently ahead of Elon Musk, 67.6% to 32.4%. We are scheduled to record our analysis episodes of the World Cup tonight with the guys from the Acquired Podcast. So no Twitter space tonight, but look for at least part one of the World Cup episodes coming to you on Saturday.

Talk to you tomorrow.