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Wed. 03/18 - The iPad is a Laptop Now! Mar 18, 2020

Show notes

It’s a day of new! New iPads pro, new Macbooks Air, new Macs Mini, and more bye bye butterfly keyboard! A new Transcribe for Android, a new design overhaul for Slack, all the specs for the new Playstation 5, and why Cameo is a new app to keep your eye on.

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Apple announces new iPad Pro with trackpad support and a wild keyboard cover (The Verge)
The MacBook Air gets an updated keyboard and souped-up specs, starting at $999 (TechCrunch)
Apple's $799 Mac mini debuts with double the storage (Apple Insider)
Google Translate launches Transcribe for Android in 8 languages (VentureBeat)
Slack unveils its biggest redesign yet (The Verge)
PlayStation 5 hardware specifications revealed (Polygon)
How Cameo Turned D-List Celebs Into a Monetization Machine (Marker)

Tue. 03/17 - Microsoft Wants To Own The Dev Stack Mar 17, 2020

Show notes

Big acquisition for GitHub... which really means: big acquisition for Microsoft as it continues to gobble up the entire developer stack. The iPhone 9 chips will not be underpowered at all. How Amazon is, in fact, trying to cope with the Corona-surge. And is this crisis the tipping point for streaming media?

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Microsoft's GitHub acquires npm to help JavaScript developers (WindowsCentral)
iOS 14 code confirms Apple planning ‘iPhone 9 Plus’ with A13 as larger version of rumored entry-level model (9to5Mac)
Amazon ramps hiring, opening 100,000 new roles to support people relying on Amazon’s service in this stressful time (Amazon Day One Blog)
Uber, Lyft suspend pooled rides in U.S., Canada to limit spread of coronavirus (Reuters)
Phones Could Track the Spread of Covid-19. Is It a Good Idea? (Wired)
To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data (NYTimes)
With Movie Theater Shutdown, Universal Pictures to Stream New Release Films on Prime Video, iTunes, & More (The Streamable)
Movie Crowds Stay Away. Theaters Hope It’s Not for Good. (NYTimes)

Mon. 03/16 - What REALLY Happened W/That Google Coronavirus Project? Mar 16, 2020

Show notes

Apple fined by France, the FCC nets a bundle at auction, new Beats earbuds, all the specs for the new Xbox Series X, and how Google got caught by surprise by President Trump’s announcement regarding Coronavirus work.

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Apple fined a record $1.2 billion by French antitrust authorities (CNBC)
FCC’s largest spectrum auction nets $4.47 billion for 5G mmWave bands (VentureBeat)
Beats announces $149 Powerbeats with 15 hours of battery life (The Verge)
Inside Xbox Series X: the full specs (Eurogamer)
Microsoft hits its goal of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 (The Verge)
Trump Oversold a Google Site to Fight Coronavirus (NYTimes)
Trump’s Google testing announcement mixed up several real projects (The Verge)
Silicon Valley Was First to Send Workers Home. It’s Been Messy. (WSJ)
Coronavirus Impact: Netflix Shuts Down Film, TV Work in U.S. and Canada as Production Nears Standstill (The Hollywood Reporter)

Fri. 03/13 - Has Coronavirus Proven ISP Datacaps Are A Sham? Mar 13, 2020

Show notes

Has the Coronavirus proven that datacaps from ISPs are a sham? Comcast accidentally published the numbers of customers who paid them not to do that. Airbnb continues to be in trouble. Cool no-code tools from Atlassian, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions.

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Housebound Italian Kids Strain Network With Fortnite Marathon (Bloomberg)
AT&T Suspends Broadband Data Caps During Coronavirus Crisis (Vice)
Comcast accidentally published 200,000 “unlisted” phone numbers (ArsTechnica)
Airbnb’s Loss Nearly Doubles in Fourth Quarter, Before Virus (Bloomberg)
Atlassian brings new automation tools to Jira Cloud (TechCrunch)

Weekend Longreads Suggestions:

The Secret History of a Cold War Mastermind (Wired)
TIM COOK’S TRICK FOR MAKING IPHONES IS NOW AT RISK FROM THE PANDEMIC (The Verge)
Why All the Warby Parker Clones Are Now Imploding (Marker)
How Google kneecapped Amazon’s smart TV efforts (Protocol)
A Chatty Auction Site Is Taking the Classic Car World by Storm (NYTimes)
The History of the URL (Cloudflare)

Thu. 03/12 - Bye, Bye, Butterfly Mar 12, 2020

Show notes

Are the factories coming back online in China? Is G Suite quietly one of the biggest platforms out there? Why is Magic Leap “exploring options” and why does it want everyone to know that? An interesting raise. And I really didn’t mean to crash the crypto markets with my comments yesterday.

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Apple Closes All 17 Stores in Italy Amid Coronavirus Pandemic (Bloomberg)
Twitter makes working from home mandatory for employees around the world in response to COVID-19 (TechCrunch)
Resumption of work at Foxconn factories in China beats expectations, says founder (Reuters)
Scoop: Google's G Suite cracks 2 billion users (Axios)
Kuo: New MacBook Pro and MacBook Air Models With Scissor Keyboards to Launch in Second Quarter (MacRumors)
The next iPhone will get a ‘world facing’ 3D camera (Fast Company)
Augmented-Reality Startup Magic Leap to Explore a Sale (Bloomberg)
Deep North raises $25.7M for AI that uses CCTV to build retail analytics (TechCrunch)
Bitcoin Hits 10-Month Low Below $6K as Stocks Plunge in Massive Sell-Off (CoinDesk)

End music: "Shoutout" by Cousin Stizz

Link to the Coronavirus Daily Briefing podcast

Wed. 03/11 - Now E3 Is Cancelled Mar 11, 2020

Show notes

E3 is cancelled. Uber might ban drivers AND riders who test positive for Coronavirus. A 2nd gen Chromecast Ultra might be coming. A Peloton-style workout app from Apple might be coming. A look at Amazon’s entry into the suddenly hot ARM-s race. And am I wrong or wasn’t crypto supposed to help during the apocalypse?

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E3 2020 Canceled After ‘Overwhelming Concerns’ About Coronavirus (Variety)
Uber may suspend accounts of riders, drivers who test positive for coronavirus (Reuters)
Exclusive: Google plans new Chromecast Ultra based on Android TV (w/ remote!) (9to5Google)
Apple Developing Fitness App for iOS 14 That Lets You Download Guided Workout Videos (MacRumors)
UK presses ahead with digital tech tax in spite of pressure from Trump (CNET)
Intel CPUs vulnerable to new LVI attacks (ZDNet)
Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute (AnAndTech)
More good news: Medical equipment is still prone to hacker attacks (VentureBeat)
SAMSUNG GALAXY S20 REVIEW: JUST RIGHT (The Verge)
Venture funding into crypto on pace to be down 40% from Q1 2019 (TheBlockGenesis)

Tues. 03/10 - Hold Me Closer, Tiny iPhone Mar 10, 2020

Show notes

A leaked version of Apple’s iOS 14 reveals a treasure trove of details about an upcoming iPhone and iPad, augmented reality software, and tracking tags; an analytics company has secretly operated VPN and ad-blocking apps and gathered data from tens of millions of users without proper disclosure, a company offering panopticon service to the state of Utah once developed disguised social-media scraping apps, Google adds quantum computing to its machine-learning open-source TensorFlow development kit, DoNotPay lets users share streaming and news logins, the latest on the coronavirus impact on the tech world, and things fall apart: political strife broke the knitting community at Ravelry.

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iOS 14 reveals iPhone 9 and updated iPad Pro details, new Apple TV remote, AirTags, more (9to5Mac)
Apple developing new augmented reality app for iOS 14, testing Apple Store and Starbucks partnership (9to5Mac)
Apple Watch Series 6 and watchOS 7 to include ‘Infograph Pro’ with tachymeter (9to5Mac)
Apple Invents Foldable iPad and iPhone that could enter a ‘Joint Operating Mode’ Similar to Microsoft’s Surface Neo (Patently Apple)
Popular VPN And Ad-Blocking Apps Are Secretly Harvesting User Data (BuzzFeed News)
Twitter thread from Will Strafach on Sensor Tower apps (Twitter)
Surveillance Firm Banjo Used a Secret Company and Fake Apps to Scrape Social Media (Motherboard)
Announcing TensorFlow Quantum: An Open Source Library for Quantum Machine Learning (Google AI Blog)
Google launches TensorFlow Quantum, a machine learning framework for training quantum models (VentureBeat)
DoNotPay Chrome browser extension (Chrome Web Store)
Now you can share your Netflix account just by sending a link (Fast Company)
How to clean your Apple products (Apple)
All but four of Apple’s stores in mainland China have reopened after coronavirus shutdown (CNBC)
Silicon Valley is effectively on lockdown over coronavirus (Cnet)
Amazon Tells New York and New Jersey Employees to Stay Home
Uber to offer drivers 14 days sick leave if they fall ill with coronavirus (CNN)
Engineer Who Attended Cyber Event Contracts Coronavirus (Bloomberg News)
How a ban on pro-Trump patterns unraveled the online knitting world (MIT Technology Review)

Mon. 03/09 - @Jack Lives To Fight Another Day Mar 09, 2020

Show notes

Another day of markets in turmoil, another Robinhood outage. Jack Dorsey lives to fight another day. Apple is repairing some iPad Airs for free, and might bring 64 MP cameras to the iPhone 12. Gaming out the reality of a ARM-based Mac. And let me hip you to “sleep streaming” on TikTok.

Sponsors:

DoubleUp.agency

Links:

Robinhood goes down again, causing clients to miss out on another historic trading day (CNBC)
Twitter CEO Dorsey keeps his job after company strikes investment deal with Elliott Management, Silver Lake (CNBC)
Apple sells fewer than 500,000 smartphones in China in February amid coronavirus (Reuters)
Amazon launches business selling automated checkout to retailers (Reuters)
SXSW canceled due to coronavirus after Austin declares ‘local disaster’ (CNBC)
Apple opens repair program for 2019 iPad Air models suffering from blank screen issue (AppleInsider)
iPhone 12 Pro leak reveals how Apple will beat the Samsung Galaxy S20 (Tom's Guide)
New AMD Side Channel Attacks Discovered, Impacts Zen Architecture (AMD Responds) (Tom's Hardware)
ARM-ed Mac: Not Again Or For Real This Time? (Jean-Louis Gassee)
How to Make Money in Your Sleep (NYTimes)

(Bonus) Inside Facebook with Steven Levy Mar 07, 2020

Show notes

I’ve said before, Steven Levy is the dean of the tech writers. All the way back in 1984 his classic book Hackers defined a tech space that wasn’t even fully aware of itself yet. Steven has written book length histories and examinations of Apple and Google, and now, with his new book, Facebook: The Inside Story, he finally tells the full Facebook story for the first time. Not the movie version, but the real story of how Facebook became Facebook from the earliest days at Harvard through the rise to 2 and a half billion users. It is, as I tell him, the best tech book I’ve read in years. If you want to fully understand Facebook, or just how a modern startup works or how a modern tech behemoth functions and sees itself in the world, I cannot recommend this book more highly.

Buy the book here.

Fri. 03/06 - Sonos Won’t Brick Your Old Hardware Anymore Mar 06, 2020

Show notes

Another flaw in Intel chips, this time unfixable. Y Combinator demo day is going online only. Sonos won’t brick your old hardware anymore. Jack Dorsey probably won’t be moving to Africa anymore. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions.

Links:

Links:

5 years of Intel CPUs and chipsets have a concerning flaw that’s unfixable (Ars Technica)
Apple is rejecting coronavirus apps that aren’t from health organizations, app makers say (CNBC)
YC W20 Online Demo Day (YCombinator)
Sonos kills its device-bricking 'recycle mode' (Engadget)
Quibi is giving people a 90-day free trial in hopes they’ll actually sign up (The Verge)
Jack Dorsey is reconsidering Africa move amid coronavirus and activist investor threats (The Verge)

Weekend Longreads Suggestions:

So you wanna buy a used IP address block? (Web Informant)
The Untold Story of the Man That Made Mainstream Encryption Possible (One Zero)
Sportswriting’s future may depend on the Athletic, which is either reassuring or terrifying (Washington Post)
Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds (NYTimes Magazine)
Can You Really Hire a Hit Man on the Dark Web? (NYTimes)
This Utility Heats New York State—And Mines Its Own Bitcoin (Bloomberg)
Classic iPod Hackers Say There’s No Better Way to Listen to Music (One Zero)

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