Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Monday, September 9, 2024, I'm Brian McCulloch today, all the headlines from today's iPhone event. It is interesting, the degree to which Elon's various businesses have potential synergies. The Times digs into the content on telegram and says, yeah, it ain't pretty. And e-bikes seem to be back in London at least. Anyway, here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Let's do it. They started out with
the Apple Watch today. It's got a new design. It's called the Series 10. Looks a lot like the Series 9, but has a bigger display and a thinner design. They claim that the display is actually slightly bigger than the Apple Watch Ultra though. 30% more screen area than the Series 9. They went on and on about how a bigger screen allows you to see more and do more on a watch. It's got a wide angle OLED display that they say emits more light.
The display updates once a second and always on mode, which is up from once a minute, apparently. There are new aluminum finishes and a new glossy black color. On the thinness tip, they say it's 10% thinner, but there's a bigger charging coil that they say lets you get up to 80% of a charge in 30 minutes. There's also a titanium model, which weighs 20% less than the stainless steel Series 9. Colors are natural gold and dark slate gray.
Translations have come natively to the Apple Watch, so there's some AI right there. On the health tip, the Series 10 can detect sleep apnea. That's pretty big news. Get ready sleep study doctors. You're about to get busy because apparently according to Apple, 80% of people who have sleep apnea right now don't know they have it. Somehow Apple is detecting sleep apnea using the acyllorometer. If they detect apnea, they'll give you a detailed
night by night report that you then give to your doctor. They expect clearance from the FDA and other countries soon with availability in more than 150 countries. Apnea notifications will also be available on Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches. What else? There's a new depth app when you're swimming, seeing how far below the surface you are. Also a water temperature
sensor. Man, they put all the sensors in these things at this point. There's new watch band styles, of course, and the new watch starts at 399 pre-ordered today, available September 20th. As for the Ultra, it is the Apple Ultra 2. There is a new finish called Satin Black though with a titanium millenies loop band, which looks frankly amazing. Like something out of a Batman movie, the Ultra 2 still starts at 799, available September 20th. Then
it was onto maybe bigger news. The new AirPods 4, which get an H2 chip. They say this leads to a massive improvement in audio quality. Machine learning allows you to do things like not yes and shake your head no to respond to Siri prompts. The new charging case is their smallest ever with 30 hours of battery life. There's also a completely second model of the AirPods 4, which does have active noise cancellation. Also a new open ear design.
Active noise canceling, transparency mode, adaptive audio. Are you slightly confused about what the different features the two AirPods 4 have? Like how to decide between them? I know I am, and I just wrote that up. What they said, a mere seconds after they said it. I'm still kind of unclear about the difference, but AirPods 4 start at $129 if you go with the active noise canceling AirPods 4 model. It's $179 pre-order today, available September
20th. Also the AirPods Max got a brief mention. New colors, USB-C charging, $549 pre-order today, available September 20th. But wait, back to the AirPods, because again, talking about confusion. Remember there are AirPods Pro as well. So the Pro are not new, but they are getting new hearing protection, which is on by default, which automatically reduces loud sounds when you're wearing them. You could wear them, say, to a loud concert, for
example, and not have your eardrums get blown out. They also have developed a clinically validated hearing loss detection program that you run via your pros and your phone. This is an aid of the fact that AirPods 2 can now be used as a clinical grade hearing aid. After you run that hearing loss test that I just mentioned, you can turn on hearing assistance when you're wearing the AirPods Pro 2. So think about this. AirPods Pro are now basically
over the counter clinical grade hearing aids. Apple expects to receive clearance from the FDA about this soon, and it will come as part of a software update coming to AirPods Pro 2 and iOS 18 this fall. So am I getting that right? If you already have AirPods Pro 2, you will get hearing aids. Gratis. Then it was on to the iPhones, designed from the ground up for Apple Intelligence, they said iPhone 16 gets a vibrant new look, which celebrates
color, they say. It looks on first blush, like just, I don't know, way richer, more vibrant colors. Like they went back to the 1980s and got a bit of glow up and, oh, that's the name for the event. There's a new ceramic glass shield that they say is 50% tougher than previous generations, 2000 nits of brightness in bright areas. The sizes of the screen are 6.1 inch for the iPhone 16, 6.7 inch for the plus. And both of these phones are getting
the action button. It's just that they're now calling it something different. They're calling it the camera control. You can adjust the camera by sliding your finger back and forth on the action button, a camera control. And there's a new A18 chip inside, which is where the Apple Intelligence goodness is going to burst forth from. They say the A18 chip has 2x faster neural engines, 17% more memory bandwidth. They say it's 30% faster,
GPU than the iPhone 15 can deliver the same performance with 30% less power. It's got a 5 core desktop class GPU, 40% faster, but using 35% less power. As for Apple Intelligence, they sort of just did a recap of everything they announced at WWDC. They reiterated how this is AI based on what your phone knows about you, but Apple does as much as it can
on device because you know privacy. If you do something intensive, AI wise, that's when they kick you to Apple's private cloud compute data is never stored or shared with Apple in their cloud compute. Then showing how you can adjust the language in your messages or creating new emoji via AI, Gen Moji, a new era for Siri. They're calling it. Yes, unless I'm wrong, they basically just restated what we heard a couple months ago. But didn't
they say at WWDC that we might not get all this stuff right away? Might have to wait for a software update or two down the road, maybe months down the road. Then there it is. The first set of Apple Intelligence features are coming in English in beta next month, Chinese French, Japanese, Spanish coming next year. But again, no timeline mentioned as to and all the promised features that they just ran through are actually going to show up.
Though they did show off a new camera control feature for visual intelligence. If you're out and about, you see a restaurant, no need to type in a search. Just hold down the new camera action button. Just hold up your phone, scan in front of you and boom, the phone gives you an answer from your video. Hasn't the pixel had this for a while now or Android? And again, we saw none of the G Wiz generative AI photo stuff that the pixel
phones rolled out last month. But anyway, this visual intelligence stuff is coming later this year. They said, you might need to check the video for this next part, almost exactly one hour in to the video to see them explain this new camera control that I've been talking about. It's not a button at all. It's flush to the phone and it's covered in Sapphire
Glass. So it's kind of like a teeny tiny MacBook trackpad. It's got haptic feedback. You click on it to launch the camera, click again to take a photo, click and hold to record video. And then remember, move your finger across the camera control back and forth to adjust various settings. Anyway, as for the cameras, again, this is the 16 and 16 plus 48 megapixel main camera with 26 millimeter focal length, 12 megapixel, 2x telephoto lens,
new ultra wide camera that can capture 2.6x light as before. Also, these phones can now capture spatial videos and photos for the Apple Vision Pro. They also did something to cut down on wind noise when you're taking videos. The A18 chip has hardware accelerated ray tracing so they can now support AAA games like Assassin's Creed Mirage. Although I feel like every year at this point in the iPhone event, they say how amazing gaming on your
phone is going to be now. And then next year they kind of say the exact same thing all over again. But red alert, red alert, they did say that they put a bigger battery in there. A big boost in battery life. They mentioned offhand and then gave us no other details. Come on, if we actually are getting more battery life, I feel like you should maybe lead with that underline that because that alone would make a certain percentage of people upgrade
right there. Anyway, prices for the 16s are the same as last year, both starting at 128 gigabytes of storage. You might be wondering what the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max get. Well, from the video, it looks like the design is basically the same, but also comes with that new camera control thing about not a button. Apple, but here's the headline. It does have a bigger display. The 16 pro now has a 6.3 inch display and the pro max gets a 6.9
inch screen. And they say that the bezels are the thinnest on any Apple product ever. Four colors, black, white, silver, and desert. They again, the mentioned battery life best ever on the slide. But twice now, Apple had the chance to give us actual numbers, like, you know, two hours more battery life on a charge. And they didn't. I cannot figure out why the chip inside the pros is the a 18 pro for the pros again versus the a 18s
in the 16s, which is again confusing. But the a 18 pro has got a 16 core neural engine, which excels at generative AI workloads. Apple says 70% increase in memory bandwidth. Apple intelligence runs 15% faster on an iPhone 16 pro. They say next generation ML accelerators, they say, but the pro is also getting pro res video recording and faster USB three speeds.
The camera is a 48 megapixel fusion camera. There's a new 48 megapixel ultra wide sensor with a quad pixel autofocus sensor and a 5x telephoto camera that is picking up that tetraprisum design that the pro max already had the camera control thing. Let's you slide between the lenses. As for video capture, apparently they somehow improve the slowmo effects. That's because you can now capture video at 4k at 120 frames per second. You can adjust playback speeds
after the capture even. I guess the sound is improved to with four studio quality mics that allows spatial audio capture during video recording. This allows tricks like isolating sound capture to just what's in the frame after capturing. Also an update to voice memos is coming that lets you do two track recording, which wow, how come they never thought of doing that before. MagSafe updates. There are now cases that have camera controls in them, which
you would think they would have to do. There's faster charging with the MagSafe cases and Qi 2. Again, how much faster charging? Again, they didn't say. The 16 pro starts at $999. The pro max starts at $1199, pre-order Friday available September 20th. And that was it. As Victoria sang mentioned at the verge though, the Apple Vision Pro during this event was mentioned exactly twice. In 2023, just 10 vulnerabilities accounted for over half of the incidents responded to
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for a share of Tesla's software revenue. Quoting the journal. X-A-I would assist in developing other features for Tesla, including a Siri-like voice assistant inside its electric cars, and software to power its humanoid robot optimists, the people said. The terms of any revenue sharing agreement between X-A-I and Tesla would depend in part upon how extensively Tesla
relied on X-A-I's technology as opposed to its own, the people said. X-A-I executives have discussed an even revenue split from Tesla's full self-driving, one of the people said. After this article was published, Elon Musk replied on X to a user's summary of it by saying, quote, haven't read the article, but the above is not accurate. And that quote, there is no need to license anything from X-A-I shortly after he posted, WSJ is talking
nonsense, end quote. Formalizing a partnership with X-A-I in which Tesla would hand over some of its revenue and future AI development to a separate Musk-controlled company would add to the tech mogul's practice of sharing assets freely across his business empire. Musk is already shifting talent and hardware between X-A-I and Tesla as he plays catch up in the AI race, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest. There is particular scrutiny
around how Musk shares resources of Tesla, which is publicly traded. Several Tesla shareholders have filed suits claiming that the shift in resources to X-A-I has hurt the car makers investors. The cases are pending in the Delaware Court of Chanceree. X-A-I has hired employees from Tesla, including several who have worked directly on the autopilot team, focused on developing self-driving capabilities. Musk also diverted thousands of hard-to-get and video
GPUs from Tesla to X-A-I last year. After that move became public, Musk said that, quote, Tesla had no place to send the Nvidia chips to turn them on, so they would have just sat in a warehouse and, quote, in other Musk company news, according to CELA's track, SpaceX controls more than 62% of all active satellites in orbit, around 10X more than closest rival one web after SpaceX launched its 7000th Starlink satellite on September 5.
Given the deraude controversy lately, it was interesting over the weekend that somebody specifically the New York Times took a look at Telegram to see the content there on, and here's what they found, quote, Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by the New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million
telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and a sidestep scrutiny from the authorities has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app. The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who
coordinate activities among almost 1 million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons, and at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries. Hamas, ISIS and other terror groups have thrived on Telegram, often amassing large audiences
across dozens of channels. The Times analyzed more than 40 channels associated with Hamas, which showed that average viewership surged up to 10 times after the October 7th attacks garnering more than 400 million views in October. Telegram is, quote, the most popular place for ill-intentioned violent actors to congregate, said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy
commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. If you're a bad guy, that's where you will land, she said, and quote. Today is bike share back, according to the Financial Times. E-bikes are booming in London, frustrating local councils over parking issues as Lyme and Forest expand their regional access. Lyme trips during peak hours have grown 91% year over year in 2024 alone.
Quote, the expanded coverage of E-bike schemes to London's outer burrows along with improvements in cycling infrastructure has helped shift the user base from wandering tourists to herd commuters. Charity, co-mo, UK reported in March 2024, there were 37,694 rental e-bikes on the streets of London, compared with 27,694 in 2023. Lyme said it had seen 91% growth to almost 11.5 million trips during peak commuting hours in London so far this year, from 6 million
in the first 3 quarters of 2023. Total monthly trips on forest bikes have grown to more than 1 million in August, up over 200% compared with the same month last year. The company said that 60% of their riders are taking two trips a day. Wayne Ting, chief executive of San Francisco based Lyme, said London had become a template for the company's business strategy in other cities. If you ask Londoners, they see Lyme as critical transportation infrastructure
end quote. Lyme operates in 230 cities including Manchester, San Francisco and Tel Aviv and has raised 1.56 billion dollars from investors including Uber and the Abu Dhabi growth fund since it was founded in 2017. Forest, which was founded in London in 2019, raised $70 million in a series A funding round last year. It claims to be breaking even and has announced plans to
expand into continental Europe. Rental e-bikes and scooters were initially considered a novelty product geared towards site seers and casual users, but despite massive venture capital investment, many startups have struggled to get a foothold. Electric scooter rental company Bird once seen as a leader in the crowded micromobility market filed for bankruptcy last year. London, however,
has emerged as a viable city for e-bike operators. They become part of the transport fabric of London like black cabs and double-decker buses, said Matthew Clark head of new mobility at steer, a business consultancy that has worked with both private operators and TFL. Writers are frequently returning to Lyme and Forest for first and last mile journeys, trips to and from tube and train stations, just under half of Londoners age 18 to 34 hired an e-bike at least once
a week according to a survey conducted by Optimum for Lyme in April. Pricing for e-bike rides varies, but Hackney Council states that the average journey on a Lyme bike in the borough cost between £3.50 and £4.50. Getting this out the door to you as soon as I can, talk to you tomorrow.