Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/11 – Groundhog Day! Is TikTok Going Dark Tomorrow?

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

So wait, is TikTok facing shutdown again, as soon as tomorrow or… what? Some analysis on how well those M1 chips might actually perform. Ring doorbells are catching fire. The Hyperloop takes its first passengers for a ride. And does China now ALSO think that big tech has gotten too big? Sponsors: VistaPrint.com/techmeme TinyCapital.com Links: TikTok hasn’t heard from the Trump administration in weeks, prompting latest CFIUS petition (CNBC) Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 - What to Expect, Based on A14 (AnAndTech) Samsung tops U.S. smartphone market in Q3: report (Yonhap News Agency) Roku Adds Apple AirPlay to 4K Devices, Which Gives Users New Workaround to Stream HBO Max and Other Mobile Apps (Variety) Ring recalls 350,000 smart doorbells after some of them caught fire (CNN Business) VIRGIN HYPERLOOP HITS AN IMPORTANT MILESTONE: THE FIRST HUMAN PASSENGER TEST (The Verge) China drafts new antitrust guideline to rein in tech giants, wiping US$102 billion from Alibaba, Tencent and Meituan stocks (South China Morning Post) 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 ride home for Wednesday, November 11th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. So wait, is TikTok facing shutdown all over again as soon as tomorrow or what?

Some analysis on how well those M1 chips might actually perform. Ring doorbells are catching fire. The Hyperloop takes its first passengers for a ride. And does China also now think that big tech has gotten too big? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Yeah, remember that whole TikTok brouhaha. We've been wondering what became of that. Well, TikTok has been wondering that too, and it has asked a federal court to intervene regarding that order to sell TikTok's operations by November 12th. November 12th is tomorrow, if you hadn't

noticed, or as the Verge headlined it, TikTok says the Trump administration has forgotten about trying to ban it would like to know what's up. Here's quoting from CNBC. TikTok hasn't had meaningful dialogue with the Trump administration's committee on foreign investment in the United States or Siphyas for weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Executives at the company are still interested in completing a technology partnership with Oracle to satisfy national security concerns, even if President-elect Joe Biden isn't as concerned with TikTok's risk profile under Chinese ownership. A November 12 CFIUS deadline calls for BightDance to, quote, divest any tangible. or intangible assets or property wherever located used to enable or support BightDance's operation of the TikTok application in the United States, end quote. But the order doesn't say what happens if BightDance does not divest assets.

That uncertainty prompted TikTok to file a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Tuesday, calling for a review of actions by Sipheus. Quote, for a year, TikTok has actively engaged with Sipheus in good faith to address its national security concerns, even as we disagree with its assessment. TikTok said in a statement. In the nearly two months since the president gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreement, but have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework, end quote. So not to go all groundhog day on you, but I got to ask,

is TikTok going to go dark tomorrow? I know we thought it would before and nothing happened, but who knows? Some drips and drabs from yesterday's Apple event, first of all, in case you were wondering, Apple does still offer higher-end Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pros and Mac minis, but if you're in the market for a MacBook Air, your only available option is to now buy one with Apple Silicon inside. They discontinued the Intel chip versions. Also, specifically, the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro is now the entry-level MacBook Pro with those two Thunderbolt ports, starting at $1,299 and $1,49 respectively. But if you go up a couple categories, the configurations that start at 1799 and 1999 still have

Intel chips inside, and those also have those four Thunderbolt ports. Also, and this is controversial, even among the tech meme editors, did you notice that the MacBook Air tops out at 16 gigabytes of RAM. You can't get more RAM in there. I mean, Apple made a point of talking about 4K video editing in the event yesterday. So don't you feel like 16 gigabytes is maybe too little to do any kind of 4K editing? Like the bare minimum to do 4K is 16 gigabytes. And even that might not be enough, at least in my opinion. But what about those M1 chips? Apple made a lot of big claims about performance and efficiency gains yesterday, and of course we don't have them in hand yet to do benchmark testing, but Anantec has done some back-of-the-envelope analysis, and they say based

on what they know of the A-14 chip, yeah, these M-1 things could be a formidable rival to any X-86 chip out there, quote. We currently do not have Apple Silicon devices and likely won't get our hands on them for another few weeks, but we do have the A-14 and expect the new Mac chips to be strongly based on the micro architecture we're seeing employed in the iPhone designs. Of course, we're still comparing a phone chip versus a high-end laptop and even a high-end desktop chip, but given the performance numbers, that's also exactly the point we're trying to make here, setting the stage as the bare minimum of what Apple could achieve with their new Apple Silicon Mac chips. Whilst in the past five years, Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance

by about 28 percent, Apple has managed to improve their design. by 10098% or 2.98x, let's call it 3x, the performance of the Apple 9 of late 2015. Apple's performance trajectory, an unquestioned execution over these years, is what has made Apple Silicon a reality today. Anybody looking at the absurdness of that graph will realize that there simply was no other choice but for Apple to ditch Intel and X86 in favor of their own in-house microarchitecture. Staying par for the course would have meant stagnation and worse consumer products, end quote. Obviously, you should click through to the link to see the graphs and charts that they're talking about, but it does bring up an idea that I hadn't

considered before. Maybe Apple wasn't pushed into abandoning Intel because Intel has dropped the ball. Maybe Apple Silicon has gotten so good that the only way they could make functionally better laptops going forward was to jump on the progress trajectory they were already seeing in their phone chips. If I'm reading this right, an Antek was analyzing a five-watt iPad chip. The M1 has 35% more density and runs at 18 watts. In the grand scheme of things, this is neither here nor there, but I do like to keep these numbers in my head from time to time to stay on top of the state of the horse race in the smartphone market.

According to Strategy Analytics, in Q3 of this year, Samsung sold more smartphones in the U.S. than Apple did for the first time in three years. Samsung had 33.7% market share in the U.S. and Apple had 30.2%. quote. Solid sales of its mid-tier and budget smartphones along with launch of flagship devices like the Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Z Fold 2 apparently boosted Samsung's presence in the U.S. Industry Insiders said the late launch of Apple's iPhone 12 series may have also helped Samsung to thrive in the U.S. Apple usually releases a new iPhone in September, but this year the U.S. Tech Titan began to sell new smartphones from October. Samsung was also the leading vendor in the global

smartphone market in the third quarter of the year with a 20,000. 21.9% share, beating China brands Huawei with a 14.1% share and Zhaomi with a 12.7% share. Apple had 11.9% market share in the global market in the third quarter, end quote. Again, neither here nor there in the long run, really, because one does get the sense that this year might be a monster upgrade cycle for the iPhone, but nonetheless, I thought those numbers were interesting. ring has a new issue, according to a CPSC notice. Ring is recalling around 350,000 ring doorbells sold between June and October of this year after receiving reports of them catching fire, which is of course not ideal, quoting CNN. The potential fire hazard impacts around 350,000

second generation ring doorbells sold in the United States and roughly 8,700 more sold in Canada, according to a notice posted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The $100 door were sold on Ring's website and on Amazon between June 2020 and October 2020, according to the CPSC. Quote, the video doorbells battery can overheat when the incorrect screws are used for installation posing fire and burn hazards, the notice said. According to the notice, Ring has thus far received 23 reports of doorbells, catching fire, and causing property damage, as well as eight reports of minor burns.

Ring did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment. Customers can check whether their ring doorbells are impacted by the recall at a link on the company's support website by entering the model and serial number printed on the back of the device, end quote. Roku has added AirPlay 2 to select 4K enabled models of its streaming devices, soundbars, and TVs, which is great news for me. As you know, I told you I just upgraded to a TCL Roku smart TV on Amazon Prime Day, but also it's a workaround for those of you who maybe want to watch HBO Max on your Roku, but can't because HBO Max and Roku haven't made a deal, quoting variety. With Airplay 2, Roku customers can stream,

control, and share content directly from their iPhone, iPad, or Mac to play back on a supported Roku device, meaning you can use the HBO Max app for Apple devices to cast content directly to Roku players. There are a couple of other workarounds to watch HBO Max on Rokos as well as Amazon's Fire TV, but for now, there's still no native app for the Roku platform. A key sticking point in the deal talks. Roku wants to continue to sell HBO as a channel, while WarnerMedia wants HBO Macs to be a discrete app in the same way Roku distributes Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, and other services. Apple's HomeKit, meanwhile, lets customers control their Roku device with their voice using the home app and Siri on iPhone, iPad,

Mac, Apple Watch, or HomePod. Roku previously announced plans to add AirPlay 2 and HomeKit to select 4K devices in late September as part of its 2020 holiday product lineup. In addition to Airplay 2 and HomeKit support, Roku OS 9.4 features a live TV channel guide on Roku TVs, provides hints for Roku voice, adds updated theme packs with sound effects and improves overall performance according to the company, end quote. The most frustrating thing with this new TV thus far has not been my inability to watch HBO Max on it, but is actually having to go in and turn off motion smoothing each and every time I install a new app.

install Hulu, I got to go in and turn off motion smoothing, install NBC sports to watch soccer, same thing. Does anyone know if there's some sort of global setting I can hit to turn motion smoothing off on every app on this TV forever? Come to think of it, does anyone know the story of motion smoothing? Like, who thinks this is a good idea? Why do all the TV makers turn it on by default? And why do they even have it? Like, it's such garbage to look at. Anyone know the story behind why TV makers push this on us?

Yesterday, I took care to note progress in self-driving cars yesterday, so I guess I would be remiss if I didn't note a bit of progress with the hyperloop, i.e. that the Hyperloop made its first passenger test over the weekend. Two people rode a Hyperloop pod through a test tube at 100 miles per hour, quoting The Verge. The test took place on Sunday afternoon at the company's Devloop test track in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two passengers were Virgin Hyperloop's chief technology officer and co-founder Josh Giggle and head of passenger experience, Sarah Luchane. After strapping into their seats in the company's

gleaming white and red Hyperloop pod dubbed Pegasus, they were transferred to an airlock as the air inside the enclosed vacuum tube was removed. The pod then accelerated to a brisk 100 miles per hour down the length of the track before slowing down to a stop. The Devloop test track is 500 meters long and 3.3 meters in diameter. The track is located about 30 minutes from Las Vegas out in the kind of desert that Hyperloop pods could one day traverse in minutes. The company says it has conducted over 400 tests on that track, but never before with human passengers until today. Quote, no one has done anything close to what we're talking about right now, Jay Walder, CEO of Virgin Hyperloop told the Verge. This is a full-scale working Hyperloop that is not just going

to run in a vacuum environment, but is going to have a person in it. No one has come close to doing it, end quote. The Pegasus Pod used for the first passenger test, also called XP2, was designed with help from famed Danish architect Bjark Engels's design firm. It represents a scaled down version of what Virgin Hyperloop hopes will eventually be a full-size pod capable of carrying up to 23 passengers. It weighs 2.5 tons and measures about 15 to 18 feet long, according to Geigel. Inside, its lush white interior is meant to be familiar to passengers who may not be immediately comfortable with the idea of slingshoting through a vacuum-sealed tube at the speed of a commercial jet. To be sure, the pod didn't reach the Hyperloop's theoretical maximum speed of

760 miles per hour. Virgin Hyperloop projects that with enough track, it can eventually get to 670 miles per hour, but the company's record to date is 240 miles per hour, which it hit in 2017, end quote. Finally today, this is an interesting story out of the South China Morning Post. China has apparently drafted new antitrust guidelines to rein in its tech giants. So maybe this whole story of China cracking down on Ant Group's IPO is indicative of something larger going on over there. Stocks of some major Chinese tech companies are down majorly on the news by more than 10% in some cases.

I'm talking JD.com, Alibaba. I so don't know the background on any of this, so I'd love to hear more from someone who understands the Chinese scene better. and also, wouldn't it be ironic if tech platforms were under siege from regulators in North America, Europe, and now China too? Maybe everybody thinks that tech has just gotten too big. What did I once say about how governments are very sensitive to and very jealous about threats to their power? They can feel when a rival grows in their midst. Quoting the SCMP, China has released a draft antitrust guideline to rein in internet-based monopolies,

signaling policymakers heightened concerns over the growing power, influence, and risks of digital platforms and their market practices in the economy. The move immediately erased about $1.2 billion worth of market value from Alibaba, Tencent, and Michwan. Monopolistic practices by internet platforms such as demanding vendors to transact only on one platform exclusively, or providing differentiated prices to customers based on their shopping history and profiles, could potentially be outlawed according to the guideline release by the state administration. for market regulation on Tuesday. This is the first time the market regulator has attempted to define what constitutes anti-competition practices among internet companies under the law. An overhaul to the anti-monopoly law in January went only so far as tweaking the language to encompass internet

companies to begin with. It will seek public opinion on the draft until the end of November. The policy is clearly targeting the tech giants with e-commerce, online food delivery, and ride-hailing platforms likely to receive the biggest blow because of how concentrated these sectors are. said Alan Lee, a portfolio manager at Atta Capital in Hong Kong. This is probably just the first shot, he said. The guideline also deems activities like platforms offering steep discounts to eliminate rivalry, colluding on sharing sensitive consumer data, and forming alliances to force out competitors as potentially monopolistic.

The latest move has put China Watchers on alert as Beijing appears to be starting to clip the wings of some of the biggest companies that helped revolutionize consumer spending behavior in the world's second largest economy. Just last week, it surprisingly halted Ant Group's record-breaking stock offering by throwing new microlending rules at the Jack Ma controlled fintech company, end quote. Seriously, can anyone point me to a good long read or newsletter or explainer about this whole tech crackdown in China? I guess I need to know more about Communist Party politics and motivations and such.

But also, if anyone has a good explainer about motion smoothing, point that my way as well. at Brian MCC on Twitter. Talk to you tomorrow.