Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/14 – iPhone 12 Pricing and Availability Surprises

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 Tech meme right home for Wednesday, October 14th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today picking up some odds and ends from yesterday's iPhone event, including some eyebrow raising clarifications on price and availability.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Zoom is indeed trying to be a platform by bringing apps to your calls. You know Defi is hot when everyone is suddenly rebranding themselves as Defi and is Dropbox leading the way to a virtual work future. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I definitely need to pick up a bunch of bits and pieces from the iPhone event yesterday. I know, for example, I tried to explain that the pre-order and delivery dates were a bit weird, but let me underline and clarify those because I might have gotten a little wrong in the whole rush yesterday. iPhone 12 pro pre-orders start this Friday, October 16th,

Starting point is 00:01:24 shipping on October 23rd. But 12 Pro Max pre-orders aren't until November 6 and they don't ship till November 13th. Same thing with the cheaper, smaller pair. Pre-orders for the iPhone 12 begin Friday, October 16, with availability again, Friday, October 23rd. iPhone 12 Mini will be available for pre-order Friday, November 6, and in stores Friday, November 13. Also, this is an interesting bit of clarification that also trickled out. Support for high-frequency MM-wave 5G bands in all of the new iPhone 12 lineup is actually limited to models sold in the U.S. Models sold outside the U.S. are limited to sub-6 gigahertz bands, quoting Sean Hollister and The Verge.

Starting point is 00:02:12 Honestly, I'm not sure it's a huge loss. MMWave 5G does offer far higher speeds than the nationwide flavor of low-band 5G that you'll also find rolling out today. But the only other consistent thing about MMWave is its inconsistency, since even outdoors, you might not find a signal from one street corner to the next. 5G isn't a good reason to buy an iPhone this year, period. MMWave definitely isn't, end quote. Also, this is a sneaky bit of a clarification.

Starting point is 00:02:42 iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 minis actually cost $30 more than their stated and advertised prices, which, as we said yesterday, according to Apple, start at $699 and $799, respect to, The reason those aren't the actual prices is because that base level includes special offers from AT&T and Verizon, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. In an incredibly sneaky move, it turns out the iPhone 12 does not actually cost $799 as advertised. If you go to the website and look at the pricing for the iPhone 12, the SIM-free price is actually $829. The iPhone 12 Mini is similarly $729 and not $699. The top line advertised prices actually include a $30 carrier discount, which is only available on AT&T and Verizon plans. That means if you are buying SIM-free unlocked or through T-Mobile or Sprint, the phone cost is $829.

Starting point is 00:03:42 The same holds for the iPhone 12 Mini. The real price of the iPhone 12 Mini is $729 unless you are eligible for the $30 discount through AT&T or Verizon. It also seems like international buyers outside the U.S. will be stuck paying the higher price, carrier special offers do not seem to be offered elsewhere. Apple's press release addresses this somewhat deceptive pricing strategy simply by saying that the headline prices, quote, includes a $30 AT&T or Verizon discount. That partly explains why Verizon was featured so prominently in yesterday's presentation, end quote. Actually, you might have noticed also that the base costs for equivalent iPhones have gone up year over year. You could have gotten an iPhone 11 starting at

Starting point is 00:04:24 $699 at launch. An equivalent iPhone 12 starts at $829, as we just said. And finally, I sort of dragged the whole promise of LiDAR and augmented reality tech on iPhones yesterday. But hey, someone's going to do something worthwhile with this tech someday, right? In fact, and as featured in the event yesterday, Snap, is among the first to leverage iPhone 12 Pro's LiDar scanner for immersive AR and says it will launch a lens specifically for the iPhone 12 Pro models, quoting TechCrunch. Here you can see an AR lens in the Snapchat app where flowers and grasses cover the table and floor and birds fly toward the user's face. The grasses toward the back of the room looked as if they were further away than those closer to the user, and vegetation was even climbing up and around

Starting point is 00:05:09 the kitchen cabinets, an indication that it saw where those objects were in the physical space. The birds in the Snapchat lens disappear as they move behind the person out of view and even land precisely on the person's hand. We understand this is the exact lens Snapchat has in the works, but the company is holding further details back for the time being. However, it shows what a LiDar-enabled Snapchat experience would feel like, end quote. However, mirroring my own frustration with all of this stuff, here's Theo Priestley on Twitter, quote, it's so sad that you literally have a 3D scanner in your pocket and the best Snapchat can come out with is yet another pointless filter, end quote. Something, something, why let others build on top of your

Starting point is 00:05:55 product when you can turn it into a platform and own the playing field and turnstiles for yourself? Zoom has launched an events platform and marketplace. In other words, get ready for some apps to help you with your Zoom calls, quoting TechCrunch. On Zoom allows hosts to run one-time events or event series with up to 100 or 1,000 attendees depending on their license, and sell. tickets for them. The idea here is for anybody, whether a yoga teacher, nonprofit, or professional event organizer, to list and sell tickets on the on-Zoom marketplace. Right now, Zoom accepts PayPal and credit card payments with the team saying that it may look into other payment options in the future. For non-profit, Zoom is also integrating the ability to receive donations through

Starting point is 00:06:38 events through its partnership with pledging. For the day-to-day Zoom user, the launch of Zaps, yeah, I don't love that name either, is probably the more interesting announcement. The idea here is to integrate apps directly into the Zoom experience so that users don't have to switch back and forth between multiple applications on their desktops. ZAPS help surface all the applications you need to be productive and enable the free flow of information between teams before, during, and after the meeting, the company writes. Think of ZAPS as an app store right where you need it most in a Zoom meeting, chat, webinar, phone call, and even your contacts directory, end quote.

Starting point is 00:07:15 These apps can be launched as screen shares, but more importantly, you can send them to all participants for real-time collaboration. The 35 launch partners include the likes of Asana, Atlassian, Dropbox, HubSpot, Slack, SurveyMonkey, and Zendesk, end quote. Bloomberg has a piece up about how Defi has replaced the term blockchain as the must-have moniker if you're in the cryptospace. Defi is so hot right now that projects like Tron, Eos, and others are hastily rebranding themselves to claim a piece of the DeFi action. quote, Nucleus Vision, a data sourcing project started in 2014 to provide consumer insights to retailers, recently announced that it's defy for retail purchase loans. Tau Network, which has been around since 2015, now states its, quote, building defy of entertainment. Tron, an operating

Starting point is 00:08:11 system active for at least three years, has issued its own defy coin. In many cases, the rebranding efforts are prompting a surge in token prices not seen since the peak of the Bitcoin bubble in late 2017. The market value of Tron's TRX coin, which is tied to a new defy token called Sun Genesis Mining, jumped by $800 million in the three days after the announcement of the new coin. Many projects are adding new features as well as rebranding. Project Nuculous Vision on August 3rd announced Nuculous Vision 2.0. That quote will aggregate existing defy lending protocols, partner with liquidity providers, and partner with global retailers and brands to enable crypto users to leverage their assets to buy real-world products, end quote. The Ventures Coin, whose market cap peaked at about

Starting point is 00:08:55 $200 million in 2018, briefly spiked from $3 million to $8.3 million on the announcement before sliding down again, according to the CryptoData tracker coin market cap.com. Tron has been investing in the DeFi ecosystem for years and now has become one of the most popular blockchains that supports defy, a spokesperson said. EOS declined to comment while Nucleus and Tao didn't return request for comment. kind of executed rhetorical pivots to Defi rather than anything structurally changing, Carter said. There's nothing illegitimate about it, but some perceive it as trying to take advantage of the hype surrounding Defi, end quote. Actually, I'm going to try to put together a weekend bonus episode to get

Starting point is 00:09:34 us a crash course on what Defi is. Like, I want to be skeptical of it as yet another new hotness in a space that is often all hype and little substance. But at the same time, like I said, the last time we discussed this, what if Defy actually is the first practical application of the blockchain to gain traction and scale. Keeping an eye on the whole unbundling of the tech office trend, Dropbox says it will be a virtual first company and in lieu of traditional offices will set up what they're calling Dropbox studios in places where there are lots of Dropbox employees so that they can get together to meet in person when they occasionally need to do that.

Starting point is 00:10:20 Is this a sign of things to come? quoting CNBC. San Francisco-based Dropbox announced Tuesday that it will stop asking employees to come into its offices and instead make remote work the standard practice even after the coronavirus pandemic ends. Remote work outside an office will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work, the company said in a blog post. For employees who need to meet or work together in person, the company is setting up Dropbox studios in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and Dublin when it's safe to do so. The company extended its management work-from-home policy through June 2021. We'll have studios in all locations we currently have offices,

Starting point is 00:10:58 whether they're dedicated spaces in places we currently have long-term leases and a high concentration of employees or on-demand spaces and other geographies, the company said. Dropbox had more than 2,800 employees as of December 31st, according to its latest 8K, end quote. And actually, let me go ahead and quote from that blog post because this is one of the most wide-ranging descriptions of a future distributed workplace that I've yet seen. Quote, while there may be some exceptions based on team and role, employees will also have flexibility to relocate outside of locations where we currently have offices.

Starting point is 00:11:32 There will be some parameters, but the choices will be much greater. As a result, we expect Dropbox to become more geographically distributed over time and hope this offers our teams more choices in where they live, work, and hire from. Utilization of Dropbox studios will vary by team needs, so we may set up new ones as our geographic distribution and employee concentration changes. Next, we're embracing what we call non-linear workdays. We're setting core collaboration hours with overlap between time zones and encouraging employees to design their own schedules beyond that. As our workforce grows more distributed, this will help balance collaboration with needs for individual focus. We want to prioritize

Starting point is 00:12:10 impact and results instead of hours worked. Finally, we're designing the whole employee experience around virtual first from IT to HR. We'll invest in a holistic ecosystem of resources, including a dedicated team to support employees and track our progress by measuring impacts on productivity, engagement, and culture so we can continue to adapt. As a first step, we've developed a virtual first toolkit, which we're also open sourcing here, so that we can add to it and share our learnings as we go, end quote. Finally today, WordPress has launched a new tool that would have been absolutely killer 10 years ago. But, Frankly, it would still be pretty useful for a lot of people that I follow on Twitter even today.

Starting point is 00:12:55 The tool lets you take blog posts, including accompanying images and videos, and post them automatically as Twitter threads. With the tool, quoting TechCrunch, once Twitter is connected, you'll select the account or accounts where you want to tweet, then choose the newly added option to share the post as a Twitter thread instead of a single post with a link. In the box provided, you'll write an introductory message for your tweetstorm so Twitter users will know what your Twitter thread will be discussing. When you then click on the publish button, the blog post will be shared as a tweet storm automatically.

Starting point is 00:13:26 The feature was also designed with a few thoughtful touches to make the tweet storm feel more natural as if it had been written directly on Twitter. For starters, WordPress says it will pay attention to the blog post formatting in order to determine where to separate the tweets. Instead of packing the first tweet with as many words as possible, it places the break at the end of the first sentence, for example. When a paragraph is too long for a single tweet, it will automatically split out into as many tweets as needed instead of being cut off. A list block, meanwhile, will be

Starting point is 00:13:52 formatted as a list on Twitter. To help writers craft a blog post that will work as a tweet storm, you can choose to view where the tweets will be split in the social preview feature. This allows WordPress users to better shape the post to fit Twitter's character limit as they write. This addresses a common complaint with Twitter threads. While it's useful to have longer thoughts posted to social media for attention, reading through paragraphs of content directly on Twitter can be difficult. But as Tweetstorms grew in popularity, tools, to solve this problem emerged. The most popular is a Twitter bot called Threadreader app, which lets users read a thread in a long-form format by mentioning the account by name within the thread, along with the

Starting point is 00:14:29 keyword unroll. With the launch of the new WordPress feature, however, Twitter users won't have to turn to third-party utilities. They can just click through on the link provided to read the content as a blog post. This in turn could help turn Twitter followers into blog subscribers, allowing the WordPress writer to increase their overall reach, end quote. This will all come as part of the of the ubiquitous jetpack on WordPress, which is now on version 9.0 and is now, today, publicly available. Are we expecting there to be a shortage of iPhone pros, you think? Or does the fact that they're becoming available first mean that there'll probably be more of them available? Debating whether or not to stay up till midnight tomorrow night to pre-order mine? Probably not,

Starting point is 00:15:17 right? I should be able to order just fine if I wake up early Friday morning. I guess we'll find out. I mean, I do have kids. It's way easier for me and way more common for me to wake up at 5.30 in the morning than it is to stay up until 12.30 in the morning these days. So I'll probably just do that. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/14 – iPhone 12 Pricing and Availability Surprises

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