Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Tuesday, September 10, 2024. I'm Brian McCulloch today. Apple loses its longest standing regulatory battle in the EU. Some drips and draps from yesterday's iPhone event would have phoned you can fold three times, be more enticing than a phone that folds just two times. And are we about to see that new strawberry AI model from Open
AI by the end of the month? Here's what you missed today on the world of tech. The European Court of Justice has ruled against Apple over a record 13 billion Euro Irish tax bill, backing a landmark decision from back in 2016. As that date implies, this is like the oldest running storyline of Europe cracking down on big tech before GDPR, before all the recent anti-competitive stuff, quoting CNBC. Europe's top court on Tuesday ruled against Apple
in the tech giants 10-year court battle over its tax affairs in Ireland. The European Commission is trying to retroactively change the rules and ignore that. As required by international tax law, our income was already subject to taxes in the US. Apple said in a statement
according to Reuters. In a statement, the Irish government said that the Apple case quote involved an issue that is now of historical relevance only, adding that its position has always been that it quote does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers. The government noted it will now begin the process of transferring the assets
in an escrow account fund to Ireland. In 2014, the European Commission, the European Union's executive arm opened an investigation into Apple's tax payments in Ireland, the tech giants headquarters in the EU. The Commission in 2016 ordered Dublin to recover up to 13 billion euros or 14.4 billion dollars in back taxes from Apple at the time saying that the tech company had received quote illegal tax benefits from Ireland over the course of
two decades. Apple and Ireland appealed the Commission's decision in 2019 and in 2020, the EU general court sided with the US tech giant. The EU's second highest court annulled the Commission's 2016 decision and said that the executive arm did not prove that the
Irish government had given Apple a tax advantage. The Commission in turn appealed the general court's decision sending the litigation up to the ECJ, the ECJ on Tuesday, set aside the general court's decision and confirmed the Commission's original 2016 ruling. Couple of details I wanted to catch from the Apple event yesterday, just an FYI that Apple will release iOS 18, Mac OS 15, iPad OS 18, watch OS 11 and Vision OS 2 on September
16th. Also, Apple has apparently discontinued their fine woven iPhone cases, which were only introduced last year to replace leather cases. They're now emphasizing their clear and silicone cases for the iPhone 16 line up. So I guess that was a swing and a miss
with fine woven. I feel like most of yesterday's event was kind of a swing and a miss. As much as Apple wanted you to come away with the thought AI iPhone, as lots of people joked online, the really tangible thing that you took away was new camera button. I'm going to find a fly Mac answer some of my questions about the battery life issue from yesterday might want to click through to the link to this story in the show notes
for charty goodness. But on the official spec page for the new iPhone lineup, let me read from the iPhone 16 pro up to remember up to does a lot of heavy lifting here up to 27 hours of offline video playback. That is up from the iPhone 15 pro rated at 23 hours of offline video playback. And considering this model has average between 22 and 23 hours on that same metric for four years now. I guess for additional hours is the biggest jump
in years. So that's not nothing. Congrats to Apple for not going thinner and actually opting to give us more juice with the space in the phone. The 16 pro max by the way jumps on that same metric to 33 hours versus 29 for last year's model. The verge got a hands-on with the new iPhones and they say despite larger displays, they don't feel that much bigger probably because the thin bezels. Also the camera control button is maybe a little too
sensitive quote. Let's start with camera control, which is a physical button. It depresses into the case ever so slightly with additional haptic feedback from Apple's taptic engine to make it feel like a chunkier click. It's not just a shutter button, although you can use it like one and click away to fire out photos from the 48 megapixel main camera with zero shutter lag. I was not able to slow it down in my short demo time, but we'll see how that
goes in real life. The reason it's not just a shutter button is that it's also a multifunctional capacitive control service. The physical button itself is ultra sensitive. So pressing it ever so slightly brings up swipe to zoom controls and double pressing it lightly brings up additional controls. You can swipe between like lens selection exposure and the new photo styles available on the pro. It took me a second to determine how hard to press, but it wasn't hard to
figure out. Apple says that as part of a software update later this year, the button will get a two stage shutter function that will allow you to lock focus and exposure. It was pretty seamless to switch between the various photo styles with swipes, but it was hard to see how much they were actually doing in the perfect lighting conditions of Apple's demo area, but I am very curious about them. I ran into Apple's Phil Schiller and we chatted briefly
about the camera control button. I wanted to know about the balance of using the button as a classic camera control versus the beginning of the camera itself, becoming an input method for Apple Intelligence and he told me that it was really both, which is fascinating. The phones themselves are slightly taller and wider than the 15 pro models making room for larger screens, a 6.3-inch panel on the 16 pro and a massive 6.9-inch display on the 16 pro max, emphasis on max.
It's made possible partly by new thinner bezels too. They don't feel all that much bigger in the hand without a case, but again, it's hard to gauge any quick hands-on and quote. From the tech with it, we're just going to make six blades folder. Huawei has unveiled the Mate XT tri-fold phone with a screen that folds into 6.4 inches, but unfolds into 10.2 inches, available in China on September 20th for $2800 plus, quoting CNBC. The phone began pre-orders
on Saturday and it set to begin in store sales on September 20th. That's the same day. Apple's new iPhone 16 series is due to launch in stores, including in China. The phone can display content on a single double or triple screen. Its battery is 1.9mm thick. The Mate XT also works with a foldable keyboard. More than 3.5 million people had pre-ordered Huawei's tri-fold Mate XT smartphone as of mid-day Tuesday, according to the company's website. The number of pre-orders rose above 4 million
after the launch event. The Mate XT comes in red and black in three storage options and is 3.6mm thick when unfolded with a 10.2 inch screen. Apple fell out of the list of top five smartphone vendors in China in the second quarter of this year, according to Cannellus. It was the first time that domestic players held all five spots to the firm said, Huawei ranked fourth by market share in China with 10.6 million smartphone shipped according to Cannellus.
And from the Lukus benefiting now from AI spend file, Oracle's shares are up 34% since January, well outpacing the NASDEX 14% rise as Oracle becomes an attractive cloud computing provider for AI developers. Quoting the journal, Oracle missed the tech industry's move to cloud computing last decade and ended up an also ran. Now the artificial intelligence boom has given it another shot.
The 47 year old company that made its name on relational database software has emerged as an attractive cloud computing provider for AI developers such as OpenAI, sending its long stagnant stock to new heights. Oracle's shares are up 34% since January, well outpacing the NASDEX 14% rise and those of bigger competitors Microsoft, Amazon and Google. It is a surprising revitalization for a company many in the tech industry had dismissed as a dinosaur of a bygone pre-cloud era.
Oracle appears to be successfully making a case to investors that it has become a strong fourth place player in a cloud market surging thanks to AI. Its lateness to the game may have played to its advantage as a number of its 162 data centers were built in recent years and are designed for the development of AI models known as training. In addition, Oracle isn't developing its own
large language model that can compete with potential clients. The company is considered such a neutral and unthreatening player that it now has partnerships with Microsoft, Google and Amazon, all of which let Oracle's databases run in their clouds. Microsoft is also running its Bing AI chatbot on Oracle servers. Other big clients include XAI and Nvidia, Oracle CoFounder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison's tight relationship with their respective chief executives,
Elon Musk and Jensen Wong, helped seal those deals. The company touted the benefits of a burgeoning AI business in its earnings Monday, posting cloud infrastructure revenue that was up 45% from the same quarter last year. Its results beat expectations and coupled with robust guidance sent the stock up 9% in after hours trading. Ellison said on the call that building giant data centers is quote something that Oracle has proven to be very good at. It's the reason we're doing so well
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strawberry AI model within two weeks as a model users can pick inside of chat GPT. It will lack multimodal capabilities at least at first. Quote. We should explain that while strawberry is part of chat GPT it's a standalone offering exactly how it will be offered is unclear. One option is for strawberry to be included in the drop down menu of AI models customers can pick from two power chat GPT the people said and it's quite different from the regular service with some
advantages and shortcomings. Of course what most differentiates strawberry from other conversational AI is its ability to think before responding rather than immediately answering a query said to people who have tested the model. That thinking stage usually lasts 10 to 20 seconds they said. But there are other key differences as well. For one thing the initial version will only be able to take in and produce text and not images which means it isn't yet multimodal the way other OpenAI models are.
As most large language models released today are multimodal this seems to be a noticeable short coming. The decision to release it as text only could reflect the pressure OpenAI is feeling to release products as it faces more competition. Then there's pricing. Strawberry is likely to be
priced differently to OpenAI's chatbot which has free and subscription pricing tiers. We're not sure exactly how strawberry will be priced but it will likely have rate limits restricting users to some maximum number of messages per hour with the potential for a higher price tier that's faster to respond according to another person with knowledge of the product. Such a cost saving move could prompt more people to pay up for the new model. Similar to the reason OpenAI caps messages
for free users of chat GPT. We would also expect paying chat GPT customers to have access to the first strawberry model before it's released to the bigger free tier of users. Whether OpenAI would charge prices significantly higher than chat GPT today for customers to use a bigger version of strawberry remains to be seen. Strawberry also is expected to be easier to use than GPT 40 for
complex or multi-step queries. Currently customers have to type all kinds of additional words into chat GPT to get the answer they want such as telling the chatbot to walk through its intermediate steps to arrive at its final answer otherwise known as chain of thought prompting. Strawberry's capabilities are supposed to help customers avoid doing that or other hacks to achieve smarter
results. This means that not only will strawberry be better at math problems and coding but also at more subjective business tasks like brainstorming product marketing strategies as we've previously reported. In these sorts of tasks the model will provide suggestions that are more specific to a user's company and more detailed like generating a week-by-week execution plan and quote.
Also on the AI tip real quick, audible plans to invite some US-based audiobook narrators to train AI on their voices, cloning them and paying for title recordings via a royalty-sharing model. Quoting Bloomberg. The new effort which kicks off this week is designed to add more audiobooks to the service quickly and cheaply and to welcome traditional narrators into the evolving world
of audiobook automation which to date many have regarded wearily. Last year Amazon began offering US-based self-published authors who make their books available on the Kindle Store the option of having their works narrated by a generic virtual voice. The initiative has been popular as of May more than 40,000 books in audible were marked as having made use of the technology.
Under the new arrangement rather than limiting the audio work entirely to company-owned synthetic voices audible will be encouraging professional narrators to get in on the action. Narrators who opt in will be able to construct their voice replicas for free. Afterward they will be compensated for any audiobooks created using their AI voice. Payments will be made on a title by title basis through a royalty-sharing model.
Finally today just an FYI if you're an adult following through on viral tick-tock videos in real life then you're adulting wrong. I mean it's bad enough when the kids do it but well here you go quoting the Wall Street Journal. JP Morgan Chase is investigating thousands of incidents of possible check fraud committed as part of a tick-tock craze and plans to share the evidence it
gathers with police departments around the country. Users on the social media platform began sharing videos that showed a so-called glitch at Chase Bank that was allowing customers to deposit big checks and withdrawal funds from ATMs immediately even if sufficient funds weren't available. Chase the largest consumer bank in the US normally allows customers to withdraw a
portion of deposited checks before the full check amount clears. However late last week a technical error allowed customers to withdraw all of the funds from a check before it had cleared. Chase says the issue which lasted a few days has since been fixed. Chase doesn't yet know the full scope of its losses but estimates that thousands of people were involved people familiar with the matter said. As with any fraud-related issue we review internally and refer to law enforcement
as appropriate. A Chase spokesman said, regardless of what you see online depositing a fraudulent check and withdrawing the funds from your account is fraud plain and simple. Chase has frozen some accounts already and could continue doing so as it finds more instances of fraud. The bank also plans to share surveillance footage and other information related to individuals who allegedly committed the fraud with authorities the people familiar with the matter said.
Check fraud which has surged in recent years is a federal crime and illegal and most states too. Most check fraud cases in the country are prosecuted under state law. As part of the scheme some people wrote checks to themselves and cashed out money they didn't have while others cash checks
written from other people's accounts that didn't have enough money. Tens of millions of people watched videos about the loophole on social media platforms tiktok slowed promotion of the story and flagged some videos adding a warning that quote participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt. One video viewed over a hundred thousand times shows a young woman calling her mother and telling her she could get 40 to $50,000 out of her chase account by cutting
a check and taking advantage of the glitch. Another video on tiktok viewed over 9 million times was incredulous that people had actually attempted the move. You took $50,000 that didn't belong to you she said. That's not a life hack. That's called robbery and quote. Nothing more for you today talk to you tomorrow.