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Foreign welcome to the TechMe Bright home for Thursday, December 19th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Apple says Meta is getting annoying. You can now call 1-800-CHATGPT to, you know, talk to ChatGPT. Apple scraps plans for a hardware subscription package. Aura's big new raise also indicates how well its smart ring business is going and has Bengaluru grown too quickly for its own good? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple says Meta has made 15 interoperability requests under the EU's Digital Markets act, more than any other company, and that these could affect users privacy and security. Quoting Reuters, Apple on Wednesday hit out at Meta platforms, saying its numerous requests to access the iPhone maker software tools for its devices could impact users privacy and security. Underscoring the intense rivalry between the two tech giants under the European Union's landmark Digital Markets act that took effect last year, Apple must allow rivals and app developers to interoperate with its own services or risk a fine of as much as 10% of its global annual turnover. Meta has made 15 interoperability requests thus far, far more than any other company for potentially far reaching access to Apple's technology stack, the latter said in a report. In many cases, Meta is seeking to alter functionality in a way that raises concerns about the privacy and security of users, and that appears to be completely unrelated to the actual use of Meta's external devices, such as Meta Smart Glasses and Meta Quest, Apple said. Meta Quest is Meta's virtual reality headset, part of the company's ambition to own the computational platform that powers virtual reality and mixed reality devices. Quote if Apple were to have to grant all of these requests, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp could enable meta to read on a user's device all of their messages and emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use, scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their passwords and more. Apple said it pointed to Meta's privacy fines in Europe in recent years as a cause of concern. What Apple is actually saying is they don't believe in interoperability. They met, a spokesperson said in a statement. Every time Apple is called out for its anti competitive behavior, they defend themselves on privacy grounds that have no basis in reality. Separately, the European Commission, which in September said it would spell out how Apple must open up to rivals, published its preliminary findings on the issue late Wednesday, giving individuals, companies and organizations until January 9th to provide feedback on its proposed measures. For Apple, the measures would require Apple to provide a clear description of the different phases, deadlines, and the criteria and considerations that it would apply or consider in assessing interoperability requests from app developers. Apple should also provide regular updates and give and receive feedback regarding the effectiveness of its proposed interoperability solution. While there would be a fair and impartial conciliation mechanism to address technical disagreements with Apple, the commission also set out the steps for Apple to provide interoperability with all functionalities of the iOS notifications feature available to Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, and any future Apple Connected physical devices to its rivals as well, End quote Bit of a gimmick for sure, but OpenAI has debuted a way to talk to ChatGPT by dialing 1-800-ChatGPT for 15 minutes of free access per month in the US or messaging the number via WhatsApp globally. Quoting CNBC by dialing the US number 1-800-242-8478 or messaging it via WhatsApp, users can access a quote, easy, convenient and low cost way to try ChatGPT out through familiar channels, OpenAI said Wednesday. At first, the company said callers will get 15 minutes free per month. The news follows a barrage of updates from OpenAI as part of a 12 day release event. The most notable announcement was the official rollout of Sora, OpenAI's buzzy AI video generation tool for the 1-800-number. Users can call without an account, but the company said in a live stream that it's working on ways to be able to integrate WhatsApp messages with a person's ChatGPT credentials. The team built the tool just a few weeks ago, an employee said on the live stream. End quote Mark Gurman says that Apple has halted work on something I didn't know they were working on, but which I probably would have been a fan of if it had come out. It was reportedly a project to build an iPhone hardware subscription service, which had been in development since 2022, quoting Bloomberg. The idea was to make owning an iPhone like subscribing to an app, with consumers paying monthly fees and getting new phones each year. But Apple recently wound down the effort, according to people familiar with the matter. The team was disbanded and reassigned to other projects, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work was confidential. The move is part of a broader shift in how Apple approaches payment services. The subscription effort was overseen by the company's Apple Pay Group, which also shuttered a Buy Now, Pay later program earlier this year. That service let shoppers pay off purchases over multiple installments but Apple is now steering consumers towards third party programs instead. Bloomberg News first reported on the iPhone subscription service in 2022, when the program was due to launch by the end of that year. It was ultimately delayed until 2023 and beyond after suffering numerous setbacks, including software bugs and regulatory concerns. Top company executives had sent the work back to the drawing board before the project was finally scrapped. When Apple began work on the hardware subscription service a few years ago, it was aiming to sell more iPhones and generate a amount of recurring revenue. The device is Apple's biggest moneymaker, accounting for just over half of annual sales. The company also wanted to further lock users into the Apple product ecosystem. It would work like this. Instead of paying for an iPhone outright or signing up for an installment plan, consumers would have a monthly fee billed to the same Apple account they use for downloading apps and subscribing to services. They'd then be able to swap out their iPhone for a new model each year. The service would have competed with and likely upset Apple's wireless carrier partners, which increasingly rely on installment programs and promotions to sell iPhones and retain customers. When the company cancelled Apple Pay Later, a major factor in the decision was stricter rules by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The agency said this year that Pay later style services would have to follow the same regulations as credit card companies. That's a headache Apple didn't want to deal with, especially since the size of the business is relatively small. Given that the iPhone subscription service would use a similar structure and technology as Apple Pay later, the company became concerned that it too would face scrutiny. Smart ring maker Aura has raised a $200 million Series D round led by Fidelity at a $5.2 billion valuation and says sales of its smart rings have doubled this year to $500 million, with around 2.5 million total rings sold to date. Quoting times Founded in Finland in 2013, Aura's latest deal is one of the largest for a private European tech company outside of the artificial intelligence sector, which has absorbed a disproportionate share of venture capital funding this year. Celebrity aficionados of Aura's rings include Prince Harry, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston, executives at IBM and Delta, as well as Silicon Valley founders such as Twitter's Jack Dorsey, Salesforce's Marc Benioff and Airbnb's Joe Gebbia. Its growing popularity has seen sales than double this year to about $500 million, with total rings sold surpassing 2.5 million. Tom Hale, ORA's chief executive has said the company is profitable, end quote and quoting TechCrunch, Aura says the new capital will allow it to expand its product offerings and further invest in product science, AI and more. The funding will also enable Aura to explore additional acquisitions, the company says. The news comes a month after Aura announced it was partnering with Dexcom to pave the way for the two companies, devices and apps to be used together. The partners means Oura rings will eventually help users monitor their blood sugar and that the two companies will co market and cross sell each other's products. Oura said at the time that Dexcom would be investing $75 million in its Series D round in 2024. The company expanded its retail presence by bringing its products to Amazon and Target. It also partnered with Naval Health Research center, the Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit to put its smart rings on the fingers of service members. In October, Aura acquired Sparta Science, a Bay Area health tracking startup. In September, Aura acquired Veri, the Helsinki based startup behind the metabolic health product of the same name. End quote and quoting cnet the smart ring market is growing increasingly competitive. Oura just launched the Oura Ring 4 in October and the Consumer Electronics show is just around the corner where we're bound to see even more health tracking rings debut. The International Data Corporation predicted in September that the smart ring category could grow by 88.4% in 2024, which would be a massive leap compared to other types of wearable such as smartwatches. End quote.
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Sony has finally detailed the PS5 Pros specs including an AMD RDNA 2 GPU and ray tracing improvements and has also announced a long term machine learning partnership with AMD. Quoting Eurogamer When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro, it did so in a very different manner to the reveal of PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation 5. While lead system architect Mark Cerny was master of ceremonies for the Pro reveal, the debut had a a short lived nine minute affair and a good proportion of that runtime celebrated the achievements of the standard PlayStation 5 console. It was a far cry from the detailed presentation given for the reveal of Sony's first Pro console and somewhat bereft of details compared to the now legendary road to PS5 presentation given by Cerny in March 2020. We were left hungry for more details and now they have finally arrived. A good three months after the reveal, Sony has delivered a brand new deep dive presentation into the hardware design and indeed the vision behind Playst PlayStation 5 Pro and it's important stuff. The philosophy behind the console marks a sea change in the way that consoles will be made. While the core graphics rendering tech of the PlayStation 5 Pro has been enhanced over the standard machine, Cerny sees a future where machine learning plays a key role in console design, and while rasterization is nearing its limits, he sees vast scaling and ray tracing capabilities going forward. At a typical clock speed of 2.17 GHz, the PS5 Pro is capable of 16.7 TF of performance, half the 35.5 TF erroneously quoted before launch. This is more directly comparable to the circa 10 TF number attached to the base PS5 versus the inflated or flop flated as Mark Cerny puts it. Rdna3traFlop counts Other specs line up with early PS5 Pro leaks, including 30 WGPs, 60 compute units and a max boost of 2.35 GHz, though this frequency isn't likely to be seen under normal operating conditions, perhaps due to power constraints. The maximum clock speed of the standard PS5 is 2.23 GHz, but the presentation suggests that typical operating speed is the same 2.17 GHz as PS5 Pro. So typical TFLOP is circa 10 TF, rarely hitting the 10.23 TF quoted in the original specs. As this generation has proven, however, TFLOPS is proving to be an increasingly meaningless metric, a situation acknowledged by Mark Cerny in the presentation. As for why PlayStation 5 Pro isn't fully embracing later AMD graphics architectures, the reason is very straightforward. Shader code for the PS5 GPU would not function on later AMD hardware, and there's no means by which those shaders could be recompiled in existing games. What about shader compilation on the fly? Well, it's not viable for PS5, and trust us, you wouldn't want it either. Therefore, PS5 Pro has to use the same rdna2.x baseline, with extensions added for new features such as enhanced ray tracing. In terms of other features, we also know from separate disclosures to developers that the PS5 Pro has the full RDNA 2 feature set, including mesh shader and hardware VRs, and there's an extra 2 gigabytes of slower DDR5 memory on board. Of that, there's over 1 gigabyte of extra memory available to developers. The GDDR6 memory used here is also around 28% faster than the base PS5, despite being connected to a similar 256 bit bus. Part of the PS5 Pro's appeal is its significant improvement in terms of RT performance, allowing developers to use these features more liberally in PS5 Pro enhanced titles without sacrificing image quality or frame to the same extent as on the base PS5. This is accomplished through the rdna2x architecture of the base PS5, with new extensions added from later RDNA technology. End quote finally today, a look at how Bengaluru, the so called Silicon Valley of India, is under pressure as rapid growth, is testing its local infrastructure. What do I mean by rapid growth? The population of the Bengaluru Bengaluru region jumped from 8 million in the year 2010 to around 14 million now. Quoting Business Insider, Bengaluru grew into an IT hub in the wake of the rapid expansion of its electronics manufacturing industry from the 1940s to the 1960s. Back in the US Silicon Valley was home to the semiconductor industry in the 1950s and owes its name to the silicon transistors produced there in the 60s. By the mid-1980s, Apple, Oracle and Microsoft had a presence in the valley, while in Bengaluru, large companies like Infosys and Texas Instruments moved in. Bengaluru is widely referred to as the Silicon Valley of India, producing tech unicorns and housing offices for companies like Amazon, Google and Dell. After taking over Twitter, Elon Musk shut down the company's offices in Delhi and Mumbai, but kept the Bengaluru office. Earlier this year, Virgin Atlantic launched daily direct flights from London to Bengaluru. However, the city's status as a tech metropole is under pressure as rapid growth tests the local infrastructure place the current population at roughly 14 million compared to 8 million in 2010. Heavy traffic, water shortages and rising property prices have led to online speculation that Bengaluru may be crumbling and debates about whether another city will emerge as a new tech hub in India. During a water crisis earlier this year, some tech companies in Bengaluru had to tell employees to stay home. The tension between Bengaluru's growth as a tech hub and the cost for its inhabitants lies at the heart of the city's future future. Harini Najendra, a professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, said, there's a city which is growing and there's obviously the economic prosperity it brings, but there's also the ecological degradation that you see everywhere. Najendra echoed Batul Fatima's suggestion of a collaborative solution with companies and residents maintaining their local environments. Narendar Pani, an economics professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru, said the city's growth also hinges on education, better education and urban planning, and the ongoing strength of the city's educational institutions. When people look at Bangalore's future, they think about roads and water, he said. Water is important, but I think more than roads, a much more critical element is education. He, like other residents who spoke to Business Insider expressed a cautious hopefulness that Bengaluru would solve its problems and continue to grow. I belong here, so I would like to think the ideas will come, he said. End quote. Y'all, I'm really close to breaking out the AI voice, but I've only got tomorrow's show and then Monday's show, with two days off in between, and then a bunch of days off for Christmas. So if we can just get through these next two episodes, hopefully by the other side of the holidays, I'll be back to normal. Talk to you tomorrow.