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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Monday, April 28th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is Apple's 20th anniversary iPhone. The reason they can't quit China just yet. That Chinese AI manus just raised a big round is Prompt engineer, the job title that never was. And what really goes on in those powerful behind the scenes Silicon Valley group chats? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Mark Gurman, Apple Scoop Monday Back to the manufacturing iPhones in India thing. Turns out there might be one big fly in the ointment for Apple. The big plans that they have for the 20th anniversary iPhone quote. As of right now, Apple has enough capacity in India to meet roughly a third of annual US Demand. Upcoming factories in India, including one intended to be the second biggest iPhone plant in the world, would help Apple get the rest of the way there. This past week we reported that Apple is aiming to produce the bulk of its US iPhones in India by 2027. While I do ultimately expect this to happen, it's far from a sure thing. There is no telling how the tariff policies will change tomorrow, let alone 18 months from now. But even if Apple does move the bulk of US bound iPhone manufacturing to India, it almost certainly won't cover everything. Apple is working on two major new iPhone models for the device's 20 year anniversary. The original model was announced at the start of 2007 and release later in the year. So there's a little wiggle room around the timing of its birthday that includes the company's first foldable and a new, more glass centric pro model. The idea that Apple would want to build those devices outside of its China comfort zone is slim, at least at the outset. While Apple's manufacturing in India has reached parity with China in terms of current iPhone quality, the 20th year anniversary models are extraordinarily complex. They'll require new parts and production techniques, making it far from a certainty that Apple will be able to build those out outside of China at some point. Yes, but certainly not by the year 2027. Keep in mind, Apple has never produced a major new product design outside China for the first go round. Actually, to this end, the FT has a deep dive into Apple's iPhone manufacturing process, which uses around 2700 parts from 187 suppliers in 28 countries. And what they found was that just 30 of those suppliers had zero presence in China. The rest of them all did. For example, the frame. The boring old aluminum frame, because the frame is made from a single piece of aluminum, a metal block is cut and shaped. It uses highly specialized machines to do that, only available at scale in China. The close proximity of suppliers and manufacturers is crucial to Apple's productivity. There are a lot of advantages to co locating the activities in the supply chain in terms of speed and quality of communication and innovation in the product and process design, says Tse, the professor at Santa Clara's Levy School of Business. It means that you can get deliveries very quickly and you can communicate with your supplier very easily. And when you put an ocean between the customer, in this case Apple and the component supplier, there is a disadvantage, he adds. This electronic ecosystem is why moving assembly to the US Introduces inefficiencies, according to Wamsi Mohan at Bank of America. If everything is not made close by, it gets complicated, he said. And while Apple may be able to find alternative manufacturers for some iPhone components, some are sole sourced. Taiwan's tsmc, the world's largest chip maker, supplies the main processor. Although the company says mass production began in Arizona in January, experts say there is no replacement for the chips produced in Taiwan and South Korea. So really, this was ostensibly a story about the iPhone, but it's about tariffs in the end, right? And even if the iPhone gets exemptions, as we've asked before, what if you're not Apple? The Wall Street Journal has a piece looking at how while big tech is largely spared from tariffs so far, small companies making devices like, I don't know, baby monitors face price hikes, shortages and degrading product quality. On May 2, the de minimis trade exemption for Chinese imports, whose retail value is $800 or less, will end. Some products will see immediate price surges. Lofty, which makes a smart Sunrise lamp, has about 750 units left in stock. The Made in China lamp now carries tariffs totaling 175%. On May 1, Lofty's sticker price rises from $275 to $450. Over $100 of that is to the US government, says Chief executive Matthew Hassett. Floss, an electric flosser, has about eight weeks of inventory left in the U.S. another two and a half months worth is on hold in China, where the manufacturer is getting ANSI for payment. Floss CEO Samantha Cox says China was the best option to manufacture the $1. The country specializes in the precision assembly required to install the flosser's tiny motor, battery and other components, she says. Cox plans to store the inventory in bonded warehouses in the US Secure facilities that allow importers to defer customs payments if tariffs go down, her product is ready to sell. No one's margins can take a 145% tariff, says Cox. Floss will only raise prices as a last resort, but will remove perks such as free shipping. Her immediate concern is whether the current stock will last until Amazon's prime day in mid July, when there's typically a price markdown. That's a huge event for a product like Floss, she says. Should the tariffs stay high, there may be more empty shelves in a few months time. Without a long term policy in place, there will be no Christmas, says Grant Prigge, CEO of smart air purifier maker Mila. Everything you're buying today was imported pre tariffs, but those warehouses will run out in the next 30 to 90 days, he says. Even if China tariffs end up lower, there will also be a massive increase in companies shipping costs, Priggy says. The 90 day pause on levies in countries other than China prompted a rush in shipments. Boat prices from Vietnam, where Mila is moving some manufacturing, went up 25% last week, he says. End quote, not tariff news, but it is news if you were an early adopter. Google says it will end support for first and second generation Nest thermostats on October 25th and won't launch new models in Europe due to its unique heating systems. Quoting the Verge, Google has just announced that it's ending software updates for the first generation Nest Learning Thermostat released in 2011 and the second gen model that came a year later. This decision also affects the European Nest learning thermostat from 2014. You will no longer be able to control them remotely from your phone or with Google Assistant, but can still adjust the temperature and modify schedules directly on the thermostat, the company wrote in a Friday blog post. The cutoff date for SOFTW updates and general support within the Google Home and nest apps is October 25th. In other significant news, Google is flatly stating that it has no plans to release additional Nest thermostats in Europe. Heating systems in Europe are unique and have a variety of hardware and software requirements that make it challenging to build for the diverse set of homes, the company said. The Nest Learning Thermostat 3rd Gen 2015 and Nest Thermostat E 2018 will continue to be sold in Europe while current supplies last. Losing the ability to control these smart thermostats from a phone will inevitably frustrate customers who've had Nest hardware in their home for many years now. Google's not breaking their core functionality, but a lot of the appeal and convenience will disappear as software support winds down. The early Nest Learning thermostats can at least be used locally without Wi fi, which isn't true of newer models. There's one bright spot for owners of recent Nest thermostats, though. Google says owners will be able to create and adjust schedules from the Google Home app later this year for the first time. Still, this type of phaseout is a very real fear tied to smart home devices as companies put screens into more and more appliances. Is 14 years a reasonable lifespan for these gadgets before the smarts fade away? There's no indication that Google plans to open source the hardware. In a clear attempt to ease customer anger, Google is offering a $130 discount on the 4th gen Nest Learning Thermostat in the US, $160 off the same device in Canada, and 50% savings on the Tadu Smart Thermostat X in Europe since the Nest lineup will be gone soon. End quote. They broke out of the gate with buzz like they might be a deep seek Mach 2, but then we kind of haven't heard much from them or at least haven't reached my radar. Nonetheless, sources say Chinese AI Startup Manus raised $75 million, led by Benchmark at a $500 million plans to expand to markets including the US, Japan and the Middle East. Quoting Bloomberg, Manus in March previewed what it called a general AI agent, capable of screening resumes, creating trip itineraries and analyzing stocks in response to basic instructions. Its service performed better on some fronts than OpenAI's deep research, another recently released agent, the company claimed at the time. Since then, several companies from ByteDance to Baidu have followed suit with their own competing agentic AI platforms. While AI agents require a certain amount of hand holding, Manus co founder and and chief scientist GE Yi Chao has said its product is truly autonomous. A slick video demonstration from the company quickly went viral, prompting a scramble for a limited number of access cores and earning the startup comparisons to Deepseek, the Chinese startup that rattled Silicon Valley in January. With a capable yet low cost model. Like Deepseek, Manus sparked questions about the US Lead on artificial intelligence, this time in a product category that American tech companies see as a key investment area. Initial reactions from Manus users were mixed, declared it groundbreaking. Others said it felt half finished. Last month, the startup began offering a $39 per month subscription and a $199 upgraded option in line with OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro. Though somewhat aggressive pricing for a membership service still in a testing phase. Speaking of potentially fading excitement about something, the journal says that prompt engineering roles one of the buzziest jobs back in 2023, when the AI moment first supernovaed, have become obsolete as AI models better intuit user intent and companies train staff in writing prompts. Quote:2 years ago everybody said, oh, I think prompt engineer is going to be the hot job, said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work for Microsoft. But it's not turning out to be true at all. As part of a recent survey commissioned by Microsoft, 31,000 workers across 31 countries were asked what new roles their companies were considering adding in the next 12 to 18 months. Prompt engineering was second from the bottom, Spataro said, while roles such as AI trainer, AI data specialist and AI security specialist topped the list. Spataro said large language models have evolved to be more iterative, conversational and aware of context. Microsoft's AI powered research agent, for example, will ask follow up questions, tell you when it doesn't understand, and asks for feedback on the information it serves up, Spataro says. In other words, you don't have to have the perfect prompt on job platform Indeed, the number of postings for prompt engineers is minimal, said Indeed's VP of AI, Hannah Calhoun. User searches on Indeed for the role surged from two searches per million total searches in the US in January 2020 three months after ChatGPTs debuted, to 144 per million in April 2023. They have since flatlined to about 20 to 30 searches per million, according to People were certainly interested in the role at the time, Calhoun said, but that interest hasn't been matched by actual employer job postings. Maybe they talked about the value of prompt engineers, but they weren't then actually hiring for that, said Calhoun. Squeezed by tight budgets and growing uncertainty with the economy, companies have been much more measured in their overall hiring in recent years. Companies such as insurer Nationwide, workwear brand Carhartt and insurance company New York Life all said they've never hired prompt engineers, but instead found that to the extent better prompting skills are needed, it was an expert expertise that all existing employees could be trained on. Nationwide, for example, has rolled out a company wide AI training program for all employees, with prompt engineering being but one of the most popular courses within it, said Chief Technology Officer Jim Fowler. So whether you're in finance, HR or legal, we see this becoming a capability within a job title, not a job title to itself, he said. End quote. Don't you just love accounting? Working on your books, bringing up fun questions like what numbers go in what column? What reports should I run? Or should I take a master's level accounting class just to understand how to use this accounting software? Well, here's some easy to use accounting and invoicing software that makes something complicated as simple as it could be. FreshBooks FreshBooks streamlines your invoicing and payment processes, saving you valuable time on data entry while while keeping your finances organized. No accounting classes required. With FreshBooks, you'll save time and get peace of mind. 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Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com ride go to shopify.com ride shopify.com ride finally today, top of tech meme for the last 24 hours has been a story from Ben Smith at semaphore taking a look at the network of group chats that surged in 2020 and have only grown over the last several years as a place where Silicon Valley insiders meet and chat, often revolving around Marc Andreessen, but also podcaster Eric Torenberg, who, by the way, his podcast was just last week, sort of aqua hired by a 16Z. This is one of those stories that I kind of debated covering because is it too inside baseball? Is it maybe too gossipy rather than actually newsy? I have a link to the piece at the end of the show Notes today, so read that if you want the goss. But since Ben Smith is a friend of the pod, I thought the way I'd cover it would be to get Ben on the phone real quick and ask him about it.
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Ben Smith
Ben Smith, thanks for popping on the pod real quick.
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Yes, fun to pop. Thank you for having me.
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Brian McCullough
So I know you're not going to.
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Ben Smith
Tell me who it was that gave you access to the various group chats that you mentioned in the piece, but I'm curious what you thought the motivation was for people to share with you the existence of chats like this.
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Well, you know, I had a couple of leaked screenshots, honestly, not that much because they use disappearing messages and but I was actually surprised how many people were willing to talk to me on the record or kind of in great detail on background about these chats, you know, that have been a huge but it's really, I think it's been a huge part of the lives of lots of powerful people and not powerful people who are, you know, shaping American culture over the last five years. And I think people feel proud about them. They feel honestly like really sentimental. Like, I think everybody realizes that it's an era that's sort of coming to a close partly as, as Trump really divides this community. And I think a lot of them look back at this having been, I mean, one of them described it to me as the republic of letters. A lot of them invoke Parisian salons. I mean, I do think the Parisian salons were probably more fun.
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Well, that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. Like you mentioned journalist, which was sort of like a left wing sort of NewsServe from like 15 years ago.
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Central left centralist.
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Brian McCullough
Right, right.
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Ben Smith
And so one of the things that I was thinking about is these things never stay secret forever. But also, and I'm going to push back a bit, I kind of feel like these things are everywhere. I don't know that this is coming to an end. Like in A way you could say this is sort of like that astronaut always has been meme. But I find it, and I find it funny how surprised people in North America are that these group chats exist. Because I feel like in Europe they've had entire governments brought down by group chat scandals for years. But I feel like this is the mode for powerful people to commiserate these days.
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Oh, for sure. I don't mean the group chats or group chats among powerful people coming from in this specific network of sort of center. Right. Anti woke pro Trump chats is coming to an end because about half the people in them are no longer pro Trump and are like, wait a second, how did I get into this kind of group think world where I got it, you know, and so there's these bitter, bitter disagreements now, which are not where, you know. Yeah. So the group think is sort of shattering. No, I mean, I think that there have always been these kind of inside conversations, whether it was like the boys on the bus or letters in the 17th century or group chats now. I do think disappearing messages, I do think real privacy makes a difference, actually. Like, I think we're most so interested in doing this story is that virtually none of this is preserved. And I think that's basically a good thing. I mean, it's, you know, spoken. It's, it's, it has a little more the character of spoken conversations than this sort of weird era we've had in which every stray thought has been documented forever.
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Right. And that's what I'm saying. Somebody listening to this. Your CEO has a group chat that you don't know about. We've heard whispers for years that the C suite at major tech companies have completely exclusive lockdown messaging systems. I even remember interviewing somebody about a company once where they're like, all of the real stuff goes down on like a CC email thread that's been running for years because the CEO only uses email to do work.
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Totally.
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But like the idea that Signal and these sorts of group chats, like, it's not just the signal gate stuff like this is where increasingly like a level of powerful or famous person, they feel they need this sort of space for themselves.
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Yeah. But yes, that's certainly true. And Signal gate was just a reflection of the fact that they're all in Signal all the time.
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Brian McCullough
Right.
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Ben Smith
Shooting emojis at each other. But I mean, I do think that that sort of period after 2020, when social media was really hot and very progressive, chased a lot of people who disagreed and were scared to disagree into more private spaces. But one of the people who's in these big group chat, one of the big group chats said to me that was so interesting was that now the thing that you're afraid to express online is criticism of Donald Trump. Trump. And that the people who are critical of Trump in the group chats are keeping that in the group chat because they don't want professional or other consequences for criticizing Trump.
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One of the things that I think Silicon Valley folks will recognize reading between the lines of your piece is sort of this is where things come from. I'm thinking about group chats for VCs and stuff like that especially. Investing is a very group think sort of activity. But like, I remember that whole Silicon Valley bank weekend, like, if yes, looking at it from the outside, it's like, how come somebody, everybody always suddenly woke up and was on the same page freaking out? It's because of chats like this. Like, where does see from the outside Lex Freeman or dorkish Patel seemingly comes out of nowhere, but suddenly can get interviews with the most powerful people in the Valley. It's these group chats. It's sort of this community.
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They literally were the vehicle for a bank run.
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Right.
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Which is the ultimate kind of herd mentality, groupthink thing. And I think that's, you know, to me that's the danger of them, that you can really wind up in these bubbles and also wind up with this feeling. And I was a journalist and, you know, I was, I'm kind of of the center. Not wasn't really partisan, but felt it a little. We're like, oh, these are my friends and they're on my team. And so we're going to work out our disagreements and we can have honest and open disagreements inside, but on the outside we are, you know, and I never felt this exactly, but felt the pull. We are rabid partisans who defend each other to the death. And actually Balaji Sreenivasan and Joe Lonsdale had a totally normal argument that I quote in the piece. And when I reached out to them for comment, they went bananas on Twitter and on X and swore that they were friends forever and no disagreement in private could possibly tear them apart in public, which she was kind of symptomatic of that like, wait, you're not allowed to have on. Like, everything you say in public is just a. So you're just sort of out there brigading. And the things you say in private are real. Like, I don't think that's super healthy.
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Well, that's the other Thing that I wanted to point out, like, reading between the lines, it's sort of like, this is how social media operates for the other half. Like, you talk about these group chats, like, coming and going. Like, instead of social media, where you have, like, this public history and this audience that follows you around and, like, you have content and. And takes for them. But then for these private chats, it's sort of like that Stephane sketch from snl. Like, when you get invited to a new one of these, it's like, oh, the cool kids have found me again. And it's, like, really active for a few months, but then it can kind of fade. And then you get invited to a new one, and it's almost like changing Personas or like, changing high schools so that it's social media where you can reinvent yourself when you get in the next, like, sort of cool kid group. Like this totally.
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And it has all of the sort of seductions of this kind of accent. Like, lots of my friends and sources who run them, I sure, for years would be like, I can't believe this, but, like, Marc Andreessen is blowing up my phone. Like, that is kind of cool. But there is also, I mean, something I have found in this moment of this kind of maximal transparency and dysfunction is that used to be if you were a powerful person, you knew things and had secrets that other people didn't know or have. And now it's like you get into, like, the sanctum sanctorum of the people who, like, behind the final door of the most powerful and important people who know everything. And it turns out they're just, like, talking about some tweet from three days ago that, like, is the same thing that, like, the dads at your barbecue were talking about. Like, there's this strange flattening, right? And, like, a lot of what they're doing in these group chats is, oh, my God, did you see this tweet? And you should tweet that. Like, those are the two main conversations.
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Last question, real quick. You mentioned Srinivasan and Lonsdale and their reaction online, but what's been the other reaction to some of the folks that are on these chats?
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Brian McCullough
If you've heard, you know, honestly, this.
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Ben Smith
I did not expect this, but, like, it's been incredible. I've been very pleased that a lot of them have been texting and emailing me and saying, hey, like, you actually got the vibe of this basically, right? So that's always a nice thing to hear after you write a story.
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Brian McCullough
Indeed.
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Ben Smith
The story, as I mentioned, is at the bottom of today's show. Notes Ben Smith from Semaphore. You have a great podcast as well, so wanted to give you a chance to mention that.
- [24:58]
Yes, please check out. If you're interested in all things media kind of writ large, please check out Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media.
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Unknown
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