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hey happy Friday I'm technically still on holidays but even the promise of a Thai Beach can't keep me from talking about the tech news so here we go this week Google revealed that their subscription business is surprisingly successful Apple kind of complied with the EU regulations once again and the United States government started drilling Tech CEOs with very little success once again welcome to the F check [Music] out this video was sponsored by brilliant okay this week the first reviews of the Apple Vision Pro have emerged and boy are things getting interesting everyone is extremely impressed by the device itself but there's also a clear lack of a kind of killer app which makes this kind of an awkward launch especially when it's a category that is 11 years old at least and especially when the device itself costs $3,500 Apple made a technically very impressive device but hasn't really solved the biggest problem with VR and AR headsets which is that we use them we like them for a few little things like watching a movie or playing a game and then that's kind of of it I think so that's kind of okay for a $500 Quest headset but for a $3,500 Apple headset and that's kind of questionable in my opinion still I do want to try one and in more bad news for Apple qualcom has just confirmed this week that apple had quietly further extended its deal to use qualcomm's 5G modems in iPhones until 2027 which means for two more years than expected damn I guess Apple developing their own modems just isn't happening anytime soon and then moving on to Samsung the new axos proc ERS were just reviewed and it turns out that they are kind of just fine for once they're still slightly below the extremely capable Snapdragon 8 gen 3 in general even if Samsung actually comes ahead in a few areas now like raate tracing and heat and battery life aren't a major issue for once either so while you'd probably still prefer a Snapdragon it's not actually a major issue anymore Hallelujah and in Surprise news this week hmd the company that was responsible for the Nokia phone Revival has just launched its own brand apparently their licensing deal for the Nokia brand was for 10 years only which will sort of expire in 2026 and so they have officially announced preparing to switch to their owner brand now so I guess say hello to hmd branded phones soon then over in things that might actually change the internet Universal Music Group has officially started pulling all of its music from Tik Tok today umg is one of the three big labels that represent a ton of stars like Taylor Swift his music will all now be pulled because they can't agree on terms this will be a wild one to watch moving on to Good News Oppo and Nokia have finally resolved their quite massive legal fight while I was on holidays and they have signed a global patent licensing deal last week this means that Oppo OnePlus Vivo and real can all start selling phones in Germany and other markets that they were banned from before and opo has already made a return nice in weird news this week we got a simulation of Doom running on eoli bacteria an MIT biotech researcher has simulated that you can actually run the video game using bacteria with a frame rate of about one new frame every 8 hours or at 0.00003 frames per second cool and to wrap up the brief Google has finally transitioned its Bard AI to using its latest and more capable Gemini pro model everywhere Bart can also as of this week generate images with Google's own AI powered image generator and the company is taging these images using image effects with what it calls synth ID which is a digital Watermark that is allegedly robust against image edits and crops that's pretty cool if it works okay and my first story of the week will be more news from Google that really caught my eye this week which is that they just announced how much money they are making from subscriptions we all know that Google has its massive advertising business which continues to do incredible numbers at nearly $250 billion in Revenue in the last year but what has surprised me is just how strongly Google has been growing its subscriptions Sundar Paya said this week that subscriptions were growing strongly and have reached $15 billion in annual revenue which is almost $4 billion per quarter and up 500% compared to 2019 which means it's growing way faster than its ads business for comparison YouTube ads have made $9.2 billion last quarter so subscriptions now make almost half as much money as YouTube ads do and the four main subscription types for Google are YouTube premium YouTube music YouTube TV and Google one so if you're wondering why they are pushing YouTube premium so hard and why they're blocking ad blockers so hard the answer is because it's working I was particularly surprised when Pai revealed that Google w the service that bundles drive storage a VPN in the US and a few other things is about to hit 100 million subscribers which is actually way more than I expected and Pai said that AI features will be added on top of this pile soon too $15 billion means that Google is now making more money from subscriptions than a company like Spotify for example it is 6% of the company's overall revenue of alphabets that is and it is also growing faster than any other major segment that they have pretty wild okay and for my second story of the week you know how the European Union's digital markets Act is forcing companies to kind of open up their world Gardens well apple found the way to only kind of technically comply again in good news Apple has for the first time ever officially announced allowing alternative browser engines on iOS at least in the EU until now old iOS browsers were just Safari with a skin on top but now Chrome Firefox and all the others can actually all ship their own engines but then in questionable news Apple now also allows alternative app stores on the iPhone which is good I guess but not only did they make it clear that they think that these are basically a major privacy and malware risk where Bad actors steal sensitive financial information they have also made the option to use them particularly tricky Apple would very much like you to know that they're just here protecting their users and not also conveniently their own bottomline anyway to begin with each alternative app store and also any app released through those app stores will both have to be notorized AKA checked and approved by Apple so every app still has to go through Apple in some way or another so surely the benefit is that the alternative app stores can at least offer lower fees right well kind of yes and no if a developer chooses to use an alternative app store or an alternative payment processor which is now also possible even within Apple's own app store by the way they will now have to pay a new 50 core technology fee per user once every 12 months or so so at least once they pass the 1 million install Mark and this is of course on top of the various fees that apple or other payment processors and third party app stores will charge of course 50 cents is just more than most apps make per user per year so this is just not a real option for most developers anyway it's also a really risky thing a malicious competitor could for example download your app to a bunch of fake iPhones which is something that apparently people already do or maybe you just haven't figured out monetization as a new developer yet and your app blows up you get like 5 million downloads and sudden have a massive Bill and nothing to pay it from pretty crazy so I think small developers will just not use this of course epic games Tim Sweeney Spotify Daniel a Xbox and more are all basically calling this a farce saying that Apple isn't really giving people a good enough option and that they'll keep fighting this and I personally kind of just want to see what an iPhone with a multiple app stores would even look like will it be great terrible something in between okay and for my third story of the week well I think that Regulators in the EU might be getting a little too trigger happy with their Tech regulation it looks like The Regulators in the US just think that their job basically consists of performative Art in a courtroom or something so this week five social media CEOs were either forced or agreed to go to Congress for a senate hearing where the CEOs of a Snapchat meta Discord and Tik Tok were legally obligated to answer Senators questions in truth related to Children's Online safety but instead of using this incredible opportunity to ask real substantial questions of the CEOs finally present in the room most of the lawmakers from from both sides actually were just busy dunking on them and scoring brownie points I guess everyone agreed that kids on social media platforms are kind of maybe a problem zck even stood up and turned around to apologize to the families in the hearing room and then nothing concrete happened now a so-called kids online safety act is being proposed by Regulators as a new set of rules to regulate the internet but it's already opposed by 90 human rights and lgbtq groups and even the efff is calling it a censorship bill so it's not exactly a home run so watching all of this unfold and no real progress being made is just really frustrating now it would obviously help if these Regulators actually educated themselves in the technical fields that they're trying to regulate or maybe they could just start with a course on logical thinking and hey brilliant has fantastic courses on things like logical thinking and even things like rationality so whether you are like a lawmaker and you're just trying to learn to think smarter or whether you're someone trying to advance their career or get ahead in school in a concrete field of stem like AI computer science engineering ing or maths brilliant has the right courses for you the courses go from beginner to Advanced levels and their special sauce is that they're all designed to be extremely interactive so each big lesson is broken into many smaller chunks that are Then followed up with interactive tasks that make you truly understand and practice your learnings this is not only just way more fun than passively reading a book or watching a lecture but it's also proven to help you actually understand and memorize what is being taught way more effectively whether you want to learn how large language model work or how probability calculations are made or how you can start thinking in code brilliant has the right courses for you and if you use my link brilliant.org TFC you will not only be able to try the platform for free but the first 200 people who sign up using that link will also be able to get 20% of their annual premium subscription if they choose to get one so check them out happy learning and I'll see you next Friday

Channel: The Friday Checkout

Views: 97,394

Keywords: tech, news, technology, analysis, techaltar, tech altar, checkout, check out, Zuckerberg, Meta, Tech CEOs, senate hearing, government, KOSA, kids online safety act, Google, Alphabet, earnings, revenue, subscriptions, Youtube premium, youtube music, google one, youtube tv, Gemini, Bard, EU, Apple, DMA, digital markets act, DSA, digital services act, app store, payments, compliance, browser engines, alternative app stores, Webkit, fees, 30%, 50 cents, 0.5 EUR

Id: auX4HanIiSc

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024