Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/28 – iPhone Recession Warning Signal?

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

On second thought, Apple is pulling back on iPhone production which suggests demand is not what they anticipated. Intel’s new 13th-Gen chips and new low-end GPU. Checking on the Elon/Twitter trial and the NFT market. And what to expect from this week’s Tesla AI event. Links: Apple Ditches iPhone Production Increase After Demand Falters (Bloomberg) The latest iPadOS 16 beta brings Stage Manager to older iPad Pro models (Engadget) Intel’s 13th Gen processors arrive October 20th with $589 flagship Core i9-13900K (The Verge) Intel Arc A770 graphics card to launch October 12 for $329 (PCGamer) NFT Trading Volumes Collapse 97% From January Peak (Bloomberg) Twitter says Elon Musk’s own data scientists did not back up bots claims (Financial Times) Turnstile is Cloudflare’s latest attempt to rid the web of CAPTCHAs (The Verge) How To Watch Tesla’s AI Day (Forbes) 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 28th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. On second thought, Apple is pulling back on iPhone production, which suggests demand is not what they anticipated.

Intel's new 13th gen chips and new low-end GPUs, checking on the Elon Twitter trial and the NFT market, and what to expect from this week's Tesla AI event. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, I guess this is a big little. recession siren. Sources say Apple has told suppliers to pull back from efforts to increase supply of iPhone 14 production by around 6 million units in the second half of this year. They're now aiming for 90 million units produced, which is on par with what we saw in 2021. This is all after Apple made a show of saying that they were still seeing aggressive sales indications, and even

last week there were rumors about how the average selling price of the iPhone was probably going up because more people were opting for the pro devices. Something looks to have changed, quoting Bloomberg. Apple is backing off plans to increase production of its new iPhones this year after an anticipated surge in demand failed to materialize, according to people familiar with the matter. Demand for high-priced iPhone 14 Pro models is stronger than for the entry-level versions, according to some of the people, in at least one case. An Apple supplier is shifting production, capacity from lower-priced iPhones to premium models they added. Apple had upgraded its sales projections in the weeks leading up to the iPhone 14 release, and some of its suppliers had started making

preparations for a 7% boost in orders. China, the world's biggest smartphone market, is in an economic slump that's hit its domestic mobile device makers, and also affected the iPhone's sales. Purchases of the iPhone 14 series over the first three days of availability in China were 11% down on its predecessor the previous year, according to a Jeffrey's note on Monday. Global demand for personal electronics has also been suppressed by surging inflation, recession fears, and disruption from the war in Ukraine. The smartphone market is expected to shrink by 6.5% this year to 1.27 billion units, according to data from MarketTracker IDC, end quote. Also, Apple, the latest iPad OS16 developer beta, has apparently made Stage Manager work with older 8.

A12X and A12Z iPads, but does not support extending the display to an external monitor. I guess I missed this whole mini-controversy, quoting and gadget. Probably the biggest change Apple announced with iPadOS 16 earlier this year is Stage Manager, a totally new multitasking system that adds overlapping, resizable windows, to the iPad. That feature also works on an external display the first time that iPads could do anything besides mirror their screen on a monitor. Unfortunately, the feature was limited. to iPads with the M1 chip. That includes the 11 and 12.9 inch iPad Pro released in May of 2021,

as well as the M1 powered iPad Air, which Apple released earlier this year. All other older iPads were left out. That changes with the latest iPad OS 16 developer beta, which was just released. Now Apple is making Stage Manager work with a number of older devices. It'll work on the 11-inch iPad Pro, first generation and later, and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, Pro, third generation and later. Specifically, it'll be available on the 2018 and 2020 models that use the A12X and A12Z chips rather than just the M1. However, there is one notable missing feature for the older iPad Pro models. Stage Manager will only work on the iPad's built-in display. You won't be able to extend your display to an external monitor.

Apple also says that developer beta 5 of iPad OS16 is removing external display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads, something that has been present since the first iPadOS 16 beta was released a few months ago. It'll be reintroduced in a software update coming later this year, given that some of the iPad community has been pretty vocal about issues with Stage Manager, particularly when using it with an external display. It makes sense that Apple is taking some extra time to keep working on it, end quote. Intel yesterday unveiled its 13th-generation desktop CPU lineup using the company's 10 nanometer process, including the $589 flagship Core I-9-13900K with 24 cores shipping on October 20th, quoting the verge.

Intel's Core I-9-13900K will ship with 24 cores, 32 threads, and clock speeds of up to 5.8 gigahertz. Built on Intel's 7 process and its X-86 performance hybrid architecture, 13th-gen processors include performance cores, P-Core. and efficient cores, e-cores, that split workloads intelligently using Intel's thread director, an embedded microcontroller inside the CPU that monitors threads and ensures they're running on the correct cores. Intel used this same architecture for its 12th-gen chips last year, and it's a similar approach to what Apple has been doing with its arm-based silicon. Instead of cramming new chips full of power-hungry cores, this P-core-E-core split should be more efficient. Having said that, these 13th-gen chips now consume more power in max-turb,

their Alder Lake predecessors. Intel's 13th gen of processors will include 22 in total, led by today's core K processors for the very high end of consumer PCs. Intel is promising up to 15% better single-thread performance on its core I-9, 13-900K, and up to 41% better multi-thread performance. While Intel hasn't bumped the number of P-cores available on its 13th gen processors, the core I5, I7, and I-9 chips, all have more e-cores. which should help in multitasking and multi-threaded apps. That works out to eight more E-Cores on the Core I-9 and four more on the Core I-7 and Core I-5 chips, end quote. By the way, Intel also plans to launch its Arc A-770 graphics card for $329 on October 12th,

hoping to compete with NVIDIA's budget G-FORS-R-TX-60 on price and performance, quoting PC Gamer. Since the A-770 is reportedly going to face-exeastern, off against the RTX 3060 in performance. Intel says it will be a match or better in at least DX12 and Vulcan games. That price makes a lot of sense. It's actually the exact same MSRP as NVIDIA's popular budget GPU, though Intel holds that no RTX 3060s are actually available for that price, instead noting a price around $418 for that card. Intel did previously tell me we'd see, quote, a card that's faster than the RTX 3060 at prices that are lower, end quote.

That's got to be the A750 then, as Intel did say that should compete with the RTX 3060 and perhaps beat it on some occasions. The A750 should be priced lower than the RtX 3062, but again, we haven't heard confirmation on the price of that card. I sure hope Intel can keep that promise anyways. After a look around on a couple of retailers just now, I'm inclined to agree that Nvidia's card doesn't sell close to its MSRP, at least for a brand new model rather than open box, though you can at least find them for a touch cheaper than mentioned, like this MSI model for $410. But point made, Intel, if it can stick to that price and maintain a steady supply of cards, which it says it has plenty of, but will roll out gradually, it may well prove a decent card for gamers on a slimmer budget, end quote. And I say this every time.

I am not celebrating this news in any way. I'm just keeping tabs. According to Dune Analytics, NFT trading voluminance. NFT trading volumes across the entire NFT market in September dropped to around $467 million, which would represent a decline of 97% from the record $17.2 billion in NFT trading in January. As multiple people said on Twitter, the top of this particular bubble was the Super Bowl, just like back 20 years ago in the dot-com bubble. It's been a while since we checked in on Elon, so let's do that. In a hearing, Twitter said that Elon Musk's consultants, the ones he hired

to estimate spam, estimated Twitter's spam count at around 5 to 11% of users. So in a way, they kind of told him exactly what Twitter told him. In addition, Twitter also says that Musk has failed to provide signal messages, including those with Mark Andresen, to Twitter in Discovery, quoting the financial Times. Twitter has said Elon Musk's own data scientists did not support his claim that the number of fake accounts on the social media platform is, quote, wildly higher than the company's estimates, as the parties prepare to go to trial in October. During a three-hour hearing in a Delaware court on Tuesday, Twitter's lawyers said documents they had received during discovery showed that two different consultants hired by Musk, Chayaabra and counteraction had produced estimates in the

amount of spam on Twitter of 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively. figures broadly in line with Twitter's public estimates. According to Twitter's lawyers, the reports were handed to the billionaire entrepreneur a day before he announced plans to terminate the merger agreement. Twitter also criticized the methodologies of both data groups despite their seemingly supportive results. Twitter has asked the court to force Musk to share more information on the work of multiple data scientist consultants with regards to fake accounts on the social media platform. The company said that while Musk had shared some details produced by his consultants, he had also engaged in, in a, quote, pattern of delay and obstruction, unquote, over the past two months, a claim Musk's lawyers denied. Separately, Twitter accused Musk's team of failing to hand over relevant signal messages

and denying that Musk used the encrypted messaging app, citing evidence of an exchange with investor Mark Andreessen in April, in which messages were automatically deleted after a period of time. The exchange was only revealed after a screenshot of it had been sent by Andresen to others via email. Twitter also said Musk's team had failed to turn over text messages between Musk and Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman, as well as with Oracle's Larry Ellison ahead of the trial, end quote. Apparently, Musk's scheduled deposition by Twitter's lawyers has been rescheduled to October 6th and 7th. The five-day trial in Wilmington, Delaware, starts on October 17. Ritting the world of passwords is cool, but you know what's also cool? Maybe cooler? ridding the world of CAPTCHAs.

Quoting the Verge. CloudFlare is testing a new kind of CAPTCHA that tests your browser instead of you. The company calls it Turnstile, and it's designed to spare us from performing those mundane click-the-traffic light kinds of tasks to verify you're a human and not a bot. Turnstile is being presented as a, quote,

user-friendly privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA. According to a press release, it will get rid of the interactive challenges used to verify people which Cloudflare says normally take an average of 32 seconds to pass and reduce the entire process to one second. Instead of presenting a visual puzzle to a user, Turnstile applies one of many browser challenges that it rotates through to look for human behavior, amping up the difficulty if a visitor exhibits non-human behaviors. Turnstile uses JavaScript-based challenges that read the web browser

environment for signals that indicate there's a person entering the site, cycling through tests like proof of work, proof of space, and probing for web APIs. It also utilizes machine learning models to compare previous successful challenges with new ones, speeding up the passing process. This isn't Cloudflare's first fist shake at CAPTCHAs. Last year, the company vowed to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely and created a hardware-enabled authenticator that uses physical USB keys like Ubiki or Fido key. Although hardware keys can work well, they require that users always have access to one.

So the company also made a version that can ask a trusted device, smartphone or otherwise, if it's, in fact, not being operated by a bot. There have been concerns that trusted devices can be duped, though. According to Ackerman Uri, CEO of the consulting firm WebOthenworks, the method Cloudflare was testing does not confirm if the device is truly human-operated. But in a partnership with Apple, Cloudflare was able to leverage private access tokens as another method to prove a person is truly the one using the device. But this method still relies on hardware, whereas the new turnstile method could skip that.

Cloudflare's turnstile is available now in beta form, is free to use, and you don't have to use the company's other web services or send your traffic through its network either. The process for setting it up is detailed on Cloudflare's website and involves replacing your current capture JavaScript with one that calls for the Turnstile API, end quote. Finally today, news of two events that we're probably going to miss. right now this afternoon, as this episode is dropping, Amazon is scheduled to hold its annual hardware event. One of the reasons, besides it being so late in the day, I don't want to delay the show for three hours just to tell you that there's a new, I don't know, microwave or something, one of the reasons that I will wait for tomorrow to cover this Amazon event is because in the past,

Amazon has announced a metric ton of products all at once. It's like the biggest product announce of the year of any company that we cover. Like in the past, they've literally announced dozens of products all at once. Now, that was back in the days when they were putting Alexa into everything, including your toothbrush. So maybe they've pulled back their ambitions a bit, but still, I'll wait for tomorrow to see how it all shakes out so I can give you only the important stuff. Alexa enabled wall clocks will not cut it this time. I am, of course, personally holding out hope that they will refresh the high end of the Kindle line today, but we can also probably expect a half a dozen new echoes, maybe some fire TV. stuff, and then there's also ring, there's Eero, who knows. Anyway, as I said, I'll wrap all that up

tomorrow. But sadly, it looks like we really might miss Tesla's AI day, since that will be on Friday and at the usual evening time that Tesla holds events 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern. So with the weekend, it's possible we might not end up talking about that event at all, which is a shame because Elon seems to be promising more this time than just people in bodystock. pretending to be robots. Quoting Forbes. The promotional materials show that the Optimus Humanoid Robot Tesla has been talking about could be the highlight of this year's AI Day. Musk mentioned how everyone would be blown away by this AI innovation during the annual general meeting. Musk even believes that robots could become more valuable than electric vehicles.

The speculation online is that the company might have the Optimus prototype working by AI Day. Elon Musk has gone as far as to tweet about the prototype to give users further hope that they could see it by then. Earlier this year, Musk mentioned that Tesla was prioritizing the product development of the Optimus Humanoid Robot in 2022 over its other products. The company even has an ambitious timeline for the project. They aim to start production in 2023. Many skeptics aren't confident that this project could come to fruition that quickly. Musk has explained that the vision for this humanoid robot is for it to complete many mundane, mundane, repetitive. or dangerous tasks in everyday life from picking groceries from the shelves to completing routine maintenance work. In addition to the robot, the Dojo Chip, is the in-house supercomputer that Tesla

announced last year that's being designed to power future Tesla products. The company only unveiled its Dojo supercomputer last year while they were still ramping up its production efforts. Many people are curious to see how the AI computing power of the Dojo chip is coming along as we inch closer to self-driving cars becoming a reality, end quote. So look for the dojo chip news as well. And I suppose that will lead into some sort of talk about FSD and maybe more promises of robot taxi services. We'll see.

Quick personal note today, I grew up in Fort Myers, Florida, on the southwest coast. Sanibel and Captiva Islands were in our high school district. And it looks like the hurricane is going to go a bit north of there, but be safe to all of my peeps in Lee and Charlotte County. Praying for you all. My folks actually are writing things out with my brother over in Miami. But be well, everybody. Be well.