Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home for Tuesday, August 15th, 2023. I'm Brian McCulloch today. Very interesting executive departure at Amazon. A popular Mac service has got to launch an alternative iOS app store. Now, nation states are trying to stockpile Nvidia chips, not just tech companies. And what is the maximum capacity of your iPhone's battery and should you check on it? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
Amazon devices and services senior vice president David Limp, who oversees Alexa, Echo and other products, plans to leave Amazon later this year. A successor for his position has not been named at the time of this recording. Now, I usually don't always cover executive office shuffled stories, but this one is interesting. Long time listeners will remember that I'm somewhat worried about the long-term survival of Alexa and Echo as products at Amazon.
And yet in this era of generative AI chatbots, can Amazon really walk away from this space? At the same time, wearables, connectivity, home robotics, home automation, those were all under Limp's purview at Amazon. And the rumor is, those all lost a total of around $10 billion in total for Amazon last year. At the same time, Limp's division also houses that project Quiper Internet from Space Project, which seems to be a major Amazon priority.
So, interesting departure in terms of what it may or may not say for the future of Amazon overall. Quoting the journal. Limp's planned departure would conclude a tenure of more than 13 years at the company where he oversees Amazon's Alexa and a portfolio of other services and gadgets that having some cases proven popular but overall have struggled to make money. The Echo device line in particular has proven more challenging to monetize in that way, said people familiar with Limp's plans.
Limp's division has been a target of the cost cuts implemented by CEO Andy Jassy that over the past year have shed some 27,000 jobs across the company. Limp's planned exit marks another disruption for the core of Amazon's senior leadership known as the S team, a number of whose members have departed over the past two years after relative stability on the management team before Jassy took the helm.
Last year, Amazon consumer CEO Dave Clark left the company after 23 years in part over friction with Jassy's hands-on management style, the Wall Street Journal reported previously. Other S team departures since mid-2021 include Jeff Blackburn, who led the media and entertainment business, Alicia Bollard Davis, senior vice president of Global Customer Fulfillment, Charlie Bell, a top leader of Amazon's cloud business, and Jay Carney, who was the top public
relations and public policy executive. Limp, 56 years old, started his career at Apple in the late 1980s and went on to work at several other companies including Palm, a leading brand of the personal digital assistance that preceded smartphones, before joining Amazon in 2010 to run its devices organization. At the time, the company's only blockbuster seller in that division was its Kindle E-reader. During his tenure, Amazon launched a number of hit products including the Echo
Smart Speaker, Fire TV streaming media player, and Fire Tablets. It also launched an ill-fated smartphone dubbed the Fire Phone that it later discontinued. While Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices, the Smart Speakers largely sell without a profit on each unit. The journal reported last year that the device's unit in some recent years had an annual operating
loss of more than $5 billion. I also don't have any idea what to make of this. X, the company formerly known as Twitter, no longer lets advertisers promote their accounts within the platform's timeline to gain followers. A source says such an advertising product was already generating $100 million annually for X, nay, Twitter. So not their biggest business line, but given the struggles toward profitability, Elon himself has admitted to, it's an odd move, quoting Axios. Promoted accounts are
one of the oldest ad formats offered on the platform. The ads appear as text-based posts within the X timeline and include a follow button for the account promoting them. But follower ads, while easy to sell, are static. They don't leverage any of the multimedia tools like video that X is trying to lean into. Ask for comment. X acknowledged that the company was depreciating the ad
unit. It said it's made recommendations to clients to try other types of ad units, including engagement campaigns, which put an advertisers name and account at the forefront of an ad, and reach campaigns that allow advertisers to pay for additional ad impressions. Many advertisers rely on promoted follower ads to grow their businesses. follower objective ad units allowed marketers to target potential audiences with more precision.
Then they could through organic tweets. The source is familiar with X's business told Axios. The change was driven by X's product group, not the revenue side of the company. The company's client team was given little time to communicate the change to clients ahead of time. The source said follower objective ads represent a small portion of X's overall ad revenue. But the company is cutting them at a time when reports suggest that it's lost a significant amount of ad revenue. End quote.
Set app known for its Mac and iOS app subscription service and full disclosure here. Recent advertiser on this very podcast plans to launch an alternative app store for iOS and iPadOS next year in the European Union, thanks to that recently passed Digital Markets Act. quoting Apple Insider software subscription service set app declared on Tuesday that it will
introduce its own rival mobile app store in 2024. Specifically in response to the DMA, the storefront will be exclusive to users of the EU and the company has launched a wait list for users. As gatekeepers like Apple and Google are being forced to open up their platforms, set app quote is now empowered to introduce its app store for EU users, ensuring that they can access and enjoy set apps extensive collection of high quality apps on
their iPhones and iPads. The service explained much like Apple's app store set apps version will offer a curated collection of mobile apps ranging from productivity tools to lifestyle applications. Over 30 current vendors of setups Mac based service will be part of the new storefront, including Ulysses, Task Heat, Note Plan and Solver. We view this development as an exciting
first step and are eager to participate. We look forward to further easing of restrictions by Apple worldwide in the future said, Michael A7 product lead at set app seven continued quote. As response to our users top requests since day one, the set app mobile app store will provide users with a more convenient way to discover and use a wide variety of apps in one place on their iPhones and iPads as well as make it easier for developers to reach a broader audience and showcase
their apps to iOS users and quote. As set up previously dealt with web and macOS developers, the new storefront creation means set up will also willingly work with iOS only developers too. The company has opened up applications from iOS developers for app submissions. To encourage adoption by developers, set up is also going after Apple's infamous 30% fee for in-app purchases and sales in the app store. Set app will distribute 70% of the users monthly fee for the service
to developers of apps that the user actually uses in the month. However, a second guaranteed 20% portion from the remainder will be handed over to the partner who brought the user to the service. While more a subscription based app distribution platform rather than an app store storefront per say, set app isn't the only company keen to take on the app store when the EU allows it. Epic Games has previously signaled in 2020 that it wants to launch its own Epic Games store on iOS.
In March 2023, Microsoft said it was planning to bring Xbox games to Apple hardware once the EU rules come into force. Tired. Silicon is the new oil, the new most important geopolitical resource in the modern world. Wired. Nvidia is the new most important geopolitical company in the modern world. Because if you have any AI ambitions even in the slightest, you need Nvidia GPUs. So, quoting the financial times. According to people familiar with the moves, Saudi Arabia has
bought at least 3,000 of Nvidia's H100 chips. A $40,000 processor described by Nvidia Chief Jensen Huang as quote the world's first computer chip designed for generative AI via the public research institution King Abdullah University of Science and Technology known as CAUST. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has also secured access to thousands of Nvidia chips and has already developed its own open source large language model known as Falcon at the state-owned technology innovation
institute in Mazdar city Abu Dhabi. The UAE has made a decision that it wants to own and control its own computational power and talent have their own platforms and not be dependent on the Chinese or the Americans. Said a person familiar with Abu Dhabi's thinking. Importantly, they have the capital to do it and they have the energy resources to do that and are attracting the best global
talent as well. The person added the Gulf states purchases of large numbers of Nvidia chips via state-owned groups come as the world's leading tech companies rush to obtain the scarce chips for AI development. Last week the financial times reported that leading Chinese tech groups such as Tencent and Alibaba are seeking to buy up Nvidia's high performance chips. The most advanced LLMs are owned by US companies using Microsoft backed OpenAI and Google. These groups are also the primary
buyers of Nvidia's H100 and A100 chips. According to multiple sources close to Nvidia and its manufacturer Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company, the chip maker will ship about 550,000 of its latest H100 chips globally in 2023 primarily to US tech companies Nvidia declined a comment in Saudi Arabia. Cows will receive 3,000 of these specialist chips worth about $120 million in total by the end of 2023 according to two people close to the university's AI labs.
By comparison, estimates suggest OpenAI trained its advanced GPT-3 model on 1024 A100 chips, the predecessor to Nvidia's latest chips, in just over a month. The Saudi university, which according to people close to Cows, also owns at least 200 A100s is building a supercomputer Shaheen-3 that will become operational this year. The machine will run 700 grace hoppers in videos so-called superchips designed for cutting-edge artificial intelligence applications.
Cows will use these chips to build its own large language model, software that can generate human like text, images, and code. Similar to OpenAI's GPT-4, which powers the popular chat GPT, according to multiple sources close to the state-owned university. Our dog Archie is a member of this family. It might sound cliche to say that, but only if you don't
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and here's another one. Nielsen has found that linear TV now makes up less than 50% of all TV viewing, at least as of this past July, a first in their two years of tracking such things, and that video streaming hit a record high of 38.7% of all TV use, quoting the Hollywood reporter. Broadcast and cable networks made up less than half of all TV use in July. The first time linear TV viewing has fallen below 50% in Nielsen's two-plus years of tracking viewing time by platform.
While overall TV use in July edged up from the previous month, the growth came in streaming, which hit an all-time high of 38.7% of all TV usage, and the other use category, which includes video games played on a TV screen and physical media playback among other things that made up 11.6% of usage. Streaming was up from 37.7% of TV viewing in June, making its third consecutive month of an increased share of viewers time. July was also the third straight month that streaming share
of TV use hit a high. As for linear TV broadcast networks fell to just 20% of viewing in July versus 20.8% in June, cable came in at 29.6% down from 30.6% the previous month. For both, it was a low point since Nielsen began releasing its monthly platform rankings, which it calls the Gage in June of 2021. In those first monthly rankings, broadcasts and cable accounted for 63.6% of all TV use in the United States, whereas now it's at 49.6%. Streaming, meanwhile, has grown from about a 26% share of
viewing in June of 2021 to a 38.7% share in July, a 48% increase among individual streamers. YouTube, not including its YouTube TV service, led the way, as usual, with 9.2% of all TV use, followed by Netflix at 8.5%. Fox's AVOD service to be had its best month to date with 1.4% of all use tied with max. Acquired series, led the streaming bump in July with suits on Netflix and peacock, accounting for more than 18 billion minutes of viewing during the month, about the same amount of
viewing time as Stranger Things had in July 2022. Disney plus's Bluey had about 5 billion minutes of viewing for the month. See, I told you Bluey was good. But anyway, bottom line, if your ears glazed over with those numbers of all watching hours now, streaming represents 38.7% cable, represents 29.6%, broadcast, a mere 20% and other coming in at 11.6%. Finally, today you always see stories like this, and I never know if they're just conspiracy
theories or not, but I'll tell you in a second why I'm doing this story. 9-5 Mac is reporting that some iPhone 14 pro users are complaining that the maximum capacity rating of their phone's battery has already dropped to around 90% after less than a year. Quote, Apple added the battery health feature to iPhones starting with iOS 11.3 in March of 2018. The feature came in response to the so-called battery gate scandal. At the time, Apple confirmed that it had been silently
throttling iPhone performance as batteries aged over time. So the battery health menu was added to settings to give users more context on their iPhone's battery. iPhones use lithium ion batteries, which chemically age throughout the device's life cycle. In a support document, Apple explains that as the battery ages the amount of charge a battery can hold diminishes. In turn, this results
in shorter amounts of time before a device needs to be recharged. Apple says iPhone batteries are quote, designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles when operating under normal conditions. Over the last several months, a growing number of iPhone 14 pro users have taken to Twitter and other social media platforms to share screenshots of their iPhone 14 pro battery's maximum capacity. This number can be found by going into the settings app,
choosing battery, then tapping battery health and charging. Apple says this number is a quote, measure of battery capacity relative to when it was new. As such, quote, lower capacity may result in fewer hours of usage between charges. End quote. There are a few possible reasons as to why users are seeing a change in their iPhone 14 pro's maximum capacity rating. First, it could be that Apple adjusted the algorithm for how this number is calculated compared to previous iPhone models.
It could also be that the iOS 17 beta has had an abnormally large impact on iPhone battery health. As always, things like power and battery management are less refined in beta versions of iOS than inversions released to the general public. Another possibility is that features exclusive to the iPhone 14 pro such as the always on display are impacting overall battery health. The iPhone 14 pro's display can also reach 2000 Nits peak brightness in outdoor environments,
nearly double that of the iPhone 13 pro. Still, Apple hasn't directly commented on these complaints from iPhone 14 pro users, so this is all conjecture for now. In general, the company recommends battery replacements when maximum capacity falls below 80%. Less than one year after the iPhone 14 pro's release, some users are getting surprisingly close to that threshold. Well, it me. I just went into my phone's settings and the maximum battery capacity was 89%.
It's a one year old or I guess not even one year old yet, iPhone 14 pro. Hmm, talk to you tomorrow.