Welcome to the tech name right home for Wednesday, September 13th, 2023. I'm Brian McCulloch today. Unity has upset game developers across the world with new pricing changes. France has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 12 over radiation concerns. Lots of extra drips and drabs from yesterday's iPhone event. And stability AI gets into the generative music generation game. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
Game developer platform Unity has announced fees based on a game's installations and a given developers plan tier slated to go into effect January 1st, 2024. Joining Unreal Engine, which has similar fees. This has the whole game dev world up and arms, however, quoting Windows Central. Unity is a popular game and app development platform often touted for its cross platform friendliness and accessibility for smaller teams. Unity has been at the forefront of independent development for some time.
Although a string of unpopular changes in the past couple of years have dramatically battered its image, the changes kicked off in line with its public stock exchange listing a couple of years back, generally speaking, as it seeks to compete with Unreal Engine and others in an increasingly competitive and volatile market.
Volatile indeed, as these recent changes to Unity's revenue models threatened to up and entire businesses and plunge projects into turmoil before they've even gotten off the ground. Unity's new model will see developers pay a monthly fee per installation, scaling up at certain thresholds. The per install fees don't seem to account for game usage time and there's no information on whether these metrics will factor in pirated copies as well.
The per installation fee also threatens charity services like Humble Bundle, free to play titles or even Xbox Game Pass, where games are less likely to go on to generate ongoing revenue via in app purchases. If someone downloads a title on Xbox Game Pass and tries it out for just 15 minutes with no intention to purchase later or get invested, this has some dire potential ramifications for developers who take on the Xbox Game Pass model.
Unity has yet to really clarify how the fees may or may not be waived in certain scenarios. One developer remarked that some metrics could see Unity stand a profit from a freemium game more than developers of certain sizes. More developers are joining the debate surrounding the new Unity revenue model, including InnerSloff, most known for its hit multiplayer game Among Us. InnerSloff added its own message on top of AgroCrab games, adding to the growing call for Unity to reverse its decision.
Unity has issued some clarifications around certain aspects of the deal, although it continues to endure heavy criticism from every side of the industry. Steven Totilo of Axios reported that Unity intends to pass on the costs for installation fees to Microsoft and other subscription providers for services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. We've reached out to Microsoft to comment on this since it appears that Unity seems to be making up its policies as it goes along.
Unity also said it will waive all the installation fees for developers who adopt its ads platform on mobile in a coercive move, which one developer at a major mobile publisher stated to me could be in breach of EU contractual law. As of this writing, Unity is sticking to its guns, despite companies like Among Us's InnerSloff and Cult of the Land Publisher, Devolver Digital, implying or outright confirming plans to move away from Unity as a platform.
Unity as a business has not had many profitable quarters. For 2022, its operating income was negative $1 billion, which is less than ideal by most metrics. Unity also announced it would commit to mass layoffs to reduce costs, shedding 6% of its global workforce. Unity's share price is down 55% since its initial public offering, and down 10% for this year alone, as the platform continues to seek consistent profitability.
Unity's financially accessible models previously gave it a competitive advantage over Unreal Engine, which operates some similar fees for game developers using its platform. With that advantage being eroded, it remains to be seen if developers pack up and move to greener pastures. It also remains to be seen how it could impact deals for subscription services like Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus, which often feature Unity-made independent games from smaller teams, often at lower prices.
Unity's fees eating into the margins may make certain ventures increasingly unviable in what is proving to be a particularly strange volatile market. 2023 has seen studio closures and layoffs a plenty, as consumers feel the pinch of inflation and increased prices around the world. Unity is potentially playing a dangerous game here, but it remains to be seen what impact this could have on its business at scale once it rolls out on January 1, 2024.
Sticking with games for the moment, Sony has released a PS5 software update, which includes support for Dolby Atmos, also using a second controller as an assist controller, and support for up to 8 terabyte SSDs. Video games chronicle. The update adds support for Dolby Atmos HDMI devices like sound bars, TVs, or home theatre systems. This enables the console to pass the PS5's 3D audio feature to Atmos devices by rendering the 3D audio channels, including overhead ones to Atmos speakers.
It also adds new accessibility features, including the ability to assign a second controller as an assist controller to a single account as well as the ability to turn on haptic feedback while navigating the PS5 system menu. Alongside these previously revealed features, several more have been announced. PlayStation Remote Play is now supported on devices running Android TV OS 12, which currently include Chromecast with Google TV, the 4K model, and the Sony Bravia XR-895L model.
Additional voice commands are also available in the US and UK while enhancements to the PlayStation app will arrive later this month. This is a weird one. France has ordered Apple to stop selling the iPhone 12 in that country due to radiation level concerns. But Apple says the device has already been certified by multiple bodies as radiation compliant.
Goatting Reuters. Apple said on Wednesday its iPhone 12 model was certified by multiple international bodies as compliant with global radiation standards after a French watchdog ordered it to stop selling the handset on the grounds it breaches European exposure limits.
The ANFR radiation watchdog told Apple on Tuesday that the Holtz sales of iPhone 12's in France after tests, which it said showed the phone's specific absorption rate or SAR, a measure of the rate of radio frequency energy absorbed by the body from a piece of equipment, was higher than legally allowed. The Agents National Deficuences, or ANFR, said it would send agents to Apple stores and other distributors to check the model was no longer being sold.
The agency, which manages France's radio frequencies and periodically tests phones to check human exposure to electromagnetic waves, said it expected Apple, quote, to deploy all available means to put an end to the non-compliance, end quote, a failure to act with result in the recall of iPhone 12's already sold to consumers it added.
Apple said it had provided ANFR with multiple Apple and independent third party lab results, including its compliance with all applicable SAR regulations and standards in the world. It said it was contesting the results of ANFR's review and would continue to engage with the agency to show it is compliant.
The ANFR said accredited labs had found absorption of electromagnetic energy by the body at 5.74 watts per kilogram during tests, simulating when the phone was being held in the hand or kept in a trouser pocket. The European standard is a specific absorption rate of 4.0 watts per kilogram, and quote. Think of your favorite entrepreneur. They wouldn't be anywhere without trusted partners, right?
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Shopify.com slash ride. Did you know that Airbnb wants risks being put out of business in Europe by a copycat competitor that cloned their website down to the pixel? We all remember the choices we made that shaped the course of our lives. In business, world-renowned venture capital firm Sequoia, a capital calls them crucible moments. And Sequoia's new podcast brings you inside the critical decisions that define some of the world's most important companies.
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After every Apple event, there are lots of little bits and bobs that trickle out the next day. For example, Xcode 15 release candidate files show iPhone 15 and 15 plus devices have six gigabytes of RAM while the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max phones have eight gigabytes of RAM, which represents a two-gigabyte increase for the Pro models. Also, remember how AirPods got USB-C charging along with the iPhones?
Well, unfortunately, it looks like Apple does not plan to sell the new AirPods USB-C charging case as a separate standalone product. Users will instead need to buy a whole new $249 pair if you want USB-C charging. Then remember how I mentioned those new six and 12 terabyte storage plans for iCloud Plus? But I didn't know the pricing. I have subsequently found out the pricing.
The six terabyte option will run you $2,999 per month and the 12 terabyte option is $59,99 per month, that's slightly more expensive than Google's similar plans. A bit of confusion around pricing generally actually. Pricing in the US for the new phones remained generally the same, but increased in China, Japan, India, and some other markets. The UK weirdly looks like it actually got some price cuts if I'm reading that right.
But back to those US prices, they are the same on the low end and kind of the same on the high end if you squint a bit. The iPhone 15 Pro Max will start at $11.99 for a version with 256 gigabytes of memory. Apple said it's the same price as last year's Pro Max model with the same storage, but the company effectively raised the minimum price for the Pro Max by $100 by eliminating a lower price 128 gigabyte model end quote.
So it's the same price for the lower end models, a price increase for the higher end, because they increased the floor storage option, which to be honest, they had been keeping the minimum storage on iPhones artificially low for years, in my opinion. But I guess the biggest selling point, at least to my mind for the Pro devices, is the titanium on the higher end ones. Makes them lighter in the hands supposedly.
Well, Nila Patel got hands on with the 15 pros and his report is they are nicer to hold thanks to the curved edges and that lighter titanium frame, but which immediately gets covered in fingerprints, quoting his impressions from the verge. The thing is made of titanium. There's an action button on the left side, and that's a USB-C port on the bottom. Oh, and a fourth thing. The sides of the phone on display were instantly and immediately covered in fingerprints.
At first glance, the 15 Pro looks just like the iPhones Pro before it, but pick one up and the lighter weight due to the titanium frame is obvious as are the curved edges. It's just nicer to hold. Apple says the titanium has allowed it to make the sides of the device thinner, which certainly makes the display look bigger than usual, but it's the same 6.1 inches on the Pro and 6.7 inches on the Pro Max.
There's a USB-C port on the bottom now, which Apple says supports 10 GBPS transfers using a USB-3 cable. Off to support live shooting 48 megapixel photos using Capture One and shooting 4K video directly to external storage. But from the outside, it just looks like a USB-C port. We'll have to test it to know more. On the side, you'll find the new action button which can be remapped using a delightfully designed menu in settings.
You can set it to launch voice memos, open the camera or flashlight, change focus modes, launch various accessibility features, or even launch shortcuts, which means it can do anything you want it to do. Camera wise, the new feature most people will immediately appreciate is the update to portrait mode, which automatically captures depth information when it detects a person cat or dog in the frame, allowing you to change photos to portrait after the fact.
You can also adjust the focus point after the fact, which is a very, very neat trick that people have been trying to ship in consumer products for a decade now. We'll have to see how this all works in reality, but here in Apple's bubble, it all seemed to work flawlessly. Finally today, you thought you could get away without some AI news, sorry friend.
Adobe announced that it has made their generative AI product Firefly generally and commercially available in Creative Cloud and other services and announced generative credits to charge for Firefly access. Quoting tech crunch. The company is going to use what it calls generative credits to measure how often users interact with these models. Basically every time you click generate to create a Firefly image, you'll consume one credit.
The company retooled the Firefly web app, for example, so that it doesn't automatically start generating images before you've made all the tweaks that you wanted to make. It's a bit complicated, but the good news here is that everybody on existing paid Adobe plans will get access to quite a few of these generative credits. Once you run out of those credits, at least on most of these plans, you won't lose access to Firefly, but it will run significantly slower.
The exception here is users who subscribe to Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express Premium, who will only get access to two generations per day until their count resets. At the end of the month, though for them, Adobe will offer additional subscription packs. Adobe did not release any specific pricing for those plans yet, though. Also, until November 1st, Adobe users subscribe to Creative Cloud, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express, and Adobe Stock won't be subject to the credit limits yet.
Meanwhile, Stability AI announced a text-to-audio tool called Stable Audio, available for free for 20 songs and 20 second tracks, or $12 a month for 500 songs and 90 second tracks, quoting Venture Beat. Stability AI today announced the initial public release of its stable audio technology, providing anyone with ability to use simple text prompts to generate short audio clips. Stability AI is best known as the organization behind the Stable diffusion text image generation AI technology.
Back in July, Stable diffusion was updated with its new SDXL base model for improved image composition. The company followed up on that news by expanding its scope beyond image to code with the launch of Stable Code in August. Stable Audio is a new capability, though it is based on many of the same core AI techniques that enable Stable diffusion to create images.
Namely, the Stable Audio technology makes use of a diffusion model, albeit trained on audio rather than images, in order to generate new audio clips. The ability to generate based audio tracks with technology is not a new thing. Individuals have been able to use what Evans referred to as symbolic generation techniques in the past. He explained that symbolic generation commonly works with MIDI musical instrument digital interface files that can represent something like a drum roll, for example.
The generative AI power of Stable Audio is something different, enabling users to create new music that goes beyond the repetitive notes that are common with MIDI and symbolic generation. Stable Audio works directly with raw audio samples for higher quality output. The model was trained on over 800,000 pieces of licensed music from audio library audio sparks. Having that much data, it's very complete metadata, Evan said.
That's one of the really hard things to do when you're doing these text-based models is having audio data that is not only high quality audio, but also has good corresponding metadata. End quote. One of the common things that users do with image generation models is to create images in the style of a specific artist. For Stable Audio however, users will not be able to ask the AI model to generate new music that, for example, sounds like a classic Beatles tune. We haven't trained on the Beatles.
Newton Rex said, with audio sample generation for musicians, that has tended not to be what people want to go for. Newton Rex noted that in his experience, most musicians do not want to start a new audio piece by asking for something in the style of the Beatles or any other specific musical group.
He wanted to be more creative, as a diffusion model, Evan said, that the Stable Audio model has approximately 1.2 billion parameters, which is roughly on par with the original release of Stable diffusion for image generation. Somehow, I've been recommending a lot of movies and TV to y'all lately. Let me do this one more time. The most recent Dungeons and Dragons movie, the one starring Chris Pine who at this point is a national treasure.
I had heard it was good from a lot of people, and it is good. Not into the spiderverse level good, but more good than it has any right to be. It's quite funny. And it's a movie that you can watch with the whole family, assuming your kids aren't scared of demons with glowing eyes. But it's not too scary, otherwise. Anyway, recommended Dungeons and Dragons. Talk to you tomorrow.