Year: 2020

Let’s address the elephant in the room. There’s an undeniable irony reviewing an ultraportable laptop when you’re not allowed to leave your house. Of course, Apple didn’t see this coming. None of us did, with the possible exception of Bill Gates, I suppose.

I bring this up not as a reminder of everything that’s wrong with the world at the present moment — you certainly didn’t need a reminder of that. Instead, I just figured it was important to note here that the testing situation is less than ideal for the MacBook Air. I haven’t left my one-bedroom New York City apartment with the thing since it arrived this morning.

In fact, I’ve mostly been working with the laptop sitting directly in front of a larger computer. One that’s big and not designed to be moved. I was feeling adventurous, however, so now I’m sitting on my bed, writing this with the Air on my lap. Damn, it feels good to live again.

There’s not a lot I can tell you about the MacBook Air that you don’t already know. One of the mainstays of the MacBook line, the Air turned 12 in January. It’s a testament to the original that the design still feels fresh well over a decade into its existence. There have been important updates to the device over the years, of course, but the laptop that hit the market nearly a year to the day before Barack Obama’s first inauguration still very much forms the foundation of the device.

“Thin” and “light” are still very much the qualities that define the Air. It’s a product that trades the processing power of the rest of the MacBook family in favor of a design that slips comfortably into the seat-back pocket in front of you on the plane. Indeed, the device has never been the one you want for heavy video processing or other resource-intensive applications. And while the 2020 model gets some important internal updates, that remains the case here.

If, however, you’re worried about lower-back pain, this is probably the MacBook for you.

The familiar wedge shape is in tact, of course. A few generations ago, that design was married with the prevailing aesthetic of the rest of the MacBook line, with a unibody design and reflective Apple logo up top.

There are still just the two Firewire 3/USB C ports onboard. Once again, they’re both on the same side. This has always been one of the bigger complaints since the redesign. Two on either side would be the best-case scenario, but until then, I’d settle for one on either, so as to avoid blocking the other one and to make it easier to plug the power cable into either side, depending on where you’re sitting relative to the outlet.

The biggest design change to the 2020 is much more subtle, however. After a rough couple of years for MacBook keyboards that culminated with a couple of consumer suits and countless jammed keys, Apple introduced a new design on last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. Mercifully, that upgrade has also come to the Air.

The system has returned to a scissor-switch design, which, among other things, results in more key travel, meaning the keys actually retract as you type, like a traditional keyboard. It’s like night and day, honestly. The butterfly mechanisms were a clear misstep for the company. In addition to lacking the tactile feedback, the fact that they were more or less flush with the laptop meant that if any debris got stuck in there, the key might just stop working. I had at least one instance of requiring some emergency compressed air at an event after the S key jammed. That’s an important key, mind.

Unlike other iterative attempts to update the butterfly mechanism, the move back to a scissor switch is a marked improvement. The keys are still relatively soft compared to other systems, but the feel is much improved — not to mention not as loud while typing. The feeling here is pretty similar to what you get with Apple’s Bluetooth Magic Keyboard peripheral. Honestly, that makes it a valuable upgrade in and of itself. There’s no Touchbar up top, instead opting for the standard function keys. The best part of the Touchbar setup — TouchID — is present, however. 

A lot about the Air remains unchanged from the big 2018 overhaul. That was, of course, the first major update in some time, bringing, most notably, the Retina display to the model for the first time ever. That’s a 2560 x 1600 IPS. It’s higher res and much better viewing angles than previous models — a big update for a model that many thought had been largely abandoned by Apple.

That’s still here. What is new, however, are some key upgrades to the inside. The default configuration ships with a tenth-generation 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i3. While the device has evolved over last year’s eighth-generation chip, that model shipped with the Core i5 standard. Apple’s clearly made some calculations to drop the base price of the system from $1,099 to $999. Apple likely wants to further differentiate the device from the rest of the line.

For even basic users, however, I’d recommend adding $100 back onto the system price in order to upgrade to an i5. That’s the chip ours came with. The system scored 5244 and 14672 on Geekbench 4’s single and multi-core tests, respectively, presenting a marked upgrade over the last model we tested, back in 2018.

The other meaningful update to the silicon is the switch from Intel UHD 617 to Iris Plus graphics. Among other things, that will help with the ability to support external monitors. The Air is capable of supporting up to a 6K external monitor, with help from display compression. RAM is once again 8GB by default (as in our configuration), upgradable to 16GB. Much bigger news on the storage side, however, as that’s been upgraded to 256GB on the base model (up from 128GB), and can be configured all the way up to a generous 2TB (from 1TB).

Interestingly, the stated battery life has actually contracted, from 12 down to 11 hours. That, of course, largely depends on usage. After several hours, I’m down to 35% left. I’ve had the brightness and everything else at default levels and have mostly been typing, using Chrome and Slack and listening to music on headphones via Spotify (along with the occasional benchmark).

All-day battery life seems like a fair enough description, when you’re multitasking; 11 hours is probably a stretch. It’s worth noting that this can vary quite a bit based on a number of factors. I’ve only really had a full day with the laptop, so I’ll update retroactively.

There are some nice upgrades here. Between the keyboard, processor and the overhaul the model got back in 2018, it’s nice to see Apple keeping the beloved line fresh a dozen years after it was first introduced.

I suspect that, for many, the fact that the laptop was introduced alongside the new iPad Pro (and its new keyboard) drove home how much the lines between the products are continuing to blur. The question comes up a lot when critics talk about Apple, as the company has traditionally taken a relatively minimalistic approach to product lines, versus, say, Samsung’s tendency to provide a wide range of different products.

But as personal computing has become more complex, so have our needs. And so, in turn, has Apple’s lineup. For a while there, it seemed like the MacBook Air was going to fade away, in favor of the standard MacBook. Ultimately, however, the Air won out, and understandably so. The focus on portability is a strong selling point, when coupled with the workflow versatility of MacOS (versus iPadOS). The Air looks like it’s going to be sticking around for a bit, and that’s something for Apple users to be thankful for.

Work in the time of coronavirus is driving huge growth in videoconferencing, as scores of office workers go remote and log on to meetings from home.

Zoom — which offers a range of slick features like auto-transcription and virtual backgrounds — has been a key beneficiary of this viral boom.

Back in February research analysts Bernstein estimated the company had pulled in more active users in two months of 2020 than in the whole of 2019, citing data from Apptopia which builds models fed by an SDK that tracks downloads across a large network of third party apps — suggesting Zoom had added 2.22M monthly active users by the end of February vs onboarding 1.99M in the whole of 2019.

In total they estimated Zoom had 12.92M MAUs, up 21% since the end of 2019.

Thing is, you don’t actually have to download Zoom’s app to use the videoconferencing tool — it can work in a browser.

Beat Zoom’s dark pattern — join from your browser

The option for joining a Zoom meeting in a browser is just really well hidden unless the meeting host has tweaked default settings.

Like literally hidden until after you’ve clicked to join a meeting — when the option to join via a browser appears in tiny text underneath a more prominent link to “download & run Zoom”.

Either it’s really terrible UX or a dark pattern intended to drive app downloads.

Hiding the option to join a Zoom call in a browser is suboptimal to say the least, given many home workers will be using corporate laptops that lock down app downloads to shrink security risks. (And COVID-19 has plenty of cyber risk attached to it.)

It’s also simply disproportionate to require downloading an app to join a call. Zoom should be shouting about the added benefits of using its app — which does support more features — rather than trying to trick users into thinking they have no choice but to download it if they want to make a meeting.

Zoom’s approach looks irresponsible, per some critics, as it can result in frustrated participants choosing to dial in to a meeting instead — thereby missing out on the ability to see multimedia content such as slides. And when the world is dealing with a global health crisis that’s really not great.

Circumventing Zoom’s dark pattern means keeping your eyes peeled for a tiny text link to “join from your browser” — and clicking the hell out of it.

Those who are hosting Zoom meetings can improve a disingenuous situation by diving into settings and toggling them so that the “join from your browser” link is automatically displayed — instead of requiring participants attempt to download Zoom first before it will appear.

Play a game of find and click the tiny padlock

To make this change you need to go to your Zoom account settings, navigate to the ‘Meeting’ tab, then ‘In Meeting (Advanced)’ — where you should find a toggle to ‘Show a “join from your browser” link’.

“Verify that the setting is enabled. If the setting is disabled, click the Status toggle to enable it. If a verification dialog displays, choose Turn On to verify the change,” is how Zoom explains the process in a help text on its website.

But there’s more! Doing all that does not actually lock the change in place for all users.

To the right hand side of the toggle is a tiny, faint grey padlock — squint and you’ll miss it — which you have to click on if you want to make this setting mandatory for all users, and then click “Lock” to confirm the change.

So two more clicks.

It’s also possible to show the browser link for all meetings hosted by members of a specific group — which can be done via ‘Group Management’, and then clicking on the name of the group, followed by the ‘Settings’ tab (then repeating the above steps).

And for your own Zoom meetings — by signing into your account, clicking on the ‘My Meetings Settings’ (if you’re an admin) or ‘My Meetings’ (if not), then navigating to the ‘Show a “Join from your browser” Link’ option on the ‘Meeting’ tab, under ‘In Meeting (Advanced)’, as before.

Should the option to show a browser link appear entirely greyed out it’s been locked at the account or group level, per Zoom’s help doc  — so you’ll either need to change it at the account level first or contact your adminstrator to request the change.

If you’re able to find it Zoom’s website has a page of information about its web client — where it recommends using Google Chrome to get maximum functionality.

But you can also join from Firefox, Safari, Edge or Internet Explorer. Who needs an app?

Claimer, a London-based startup that makes it easy for companies to claim R&D tax credits in the U.K., has raised £300,000 in seed funding.

Backing the already revenue-generating company is Ben Holmes (who was previously at Index Ventures), Nick Telson and Andrew Webster (the founders of DesignMyNight, which recently exited), Rupert Loman (founder of Gamer Network), and TrueSight Ventures.

Founded by Adam McCann in January 2018 and then launched in April 2019, Claimer streamlines the process of claiming R&D tax credits, which is a U.K. government subsidy popular with tech startups that is designed to encourage innovation. The startup claims its product is approximately 10x faster and up to 6x cheaper than using a tax consultant.

“Claimer is fixing the R&D tax relief space with tech,” McCann tells me. “If you’re not familiar with the scheme, it’s run by HMRC and allows U.K. businesses to claim back up to 33% of their research & development costs as a cash payment in any industry, such as software and hardware development, manufacturing, textiles, biotechnology, foodtech, and many others.

“Most accountants don’t have the in-house expertise to process claims, so they refer clients to R&D tax specialists. For many companies, the process is slow, expensive, and frustrating, because these specialists charge very high fees, often taking weeks to process claims”.

In contrast, McCann says Claimer’s platform makes it easy for businesses to reliably complete their R&D relief claims without any prior tax knowledge. After you upload a claim to the platform — which includes the ability to pull numbers from your accounting software — Claimer’s in-house tax specialists check and optimise it before it is submitted to HMRC.

“We’ve processed claims ranging from £1,000 to over £2 million with a 100% success rate (i.e. no rejections or reductions). Our customers have also awarded us 5 stars on TrustPilot,” he adds.

To that end, Claimer’s success is aligned with that of its customers. The startup charges a fee of 5% or less of the saving/credit received in R&D tax credits, capped to £10,000. McCann says this is much less than the typical uncapped 20-30% usually charged by specialists, “often with undesirable terms such as multi-year lock-in contracts, hidden costs, and large minimum fees”.

Meanwhile, Claimer plans to use the seed funding to grow its engineering team and build version two of the product, which McCann says will utilise open data and machine learning, making it possible for claims to be created automatically.

“And yes, we’ll be claiming R&D tax credits for developing our R&D tax credits platform,” quips the Claimer founder.

Disney said on Friday that it is postponing the launch of its eponymous streaming service in India after the biggest local attraction, cricket tournament Indian Premier League (IPL), was rescheduled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The company, which is launching the streaming service through its local streamer Hotstar, did not immediately have a new launch to share, but said the rollout was only being “briefly paused.”

“We recently announced that Disney+ would launch in India through the Hotstar service in conjunction with the beginning of the Indian Premier League cricket season,” said Uday Shankar, President of The Walt Disney Company APAC and Chairman of Star & Disney India, in a statement.

“Given the delay of the season, we have made the decision to briefly pause the roll-out of Disney+ and will announce a new revised premiere date for the service soon,” he added.

Disney said last month that it would roll out Disney+ in India on March 29. But the company started to test the service with a small group of users earlier this month. Last week, the company also cancelled a press briefing on Disney+’ India plans citing concerns over the disease.

The IPL cricket tournament, which sees more than 60 games played over a period of seven to eight weeks, is by far the biggest attraction on Hotstar. The tournament is so popular in India that it has helped Hotstar set streaming records. Last year, the service said more than 25 million viewers simultaneously watched a game.

The service had amassed over 300 million monthly active users and 100 million daily active users during the tail end of the IPL season last year. The commencement of the tournament has been postponed from next week to April 15.

In a press conference, Governor of California Gavin Newsom ordered “all individuals living in the State of California to stay home or at their place of residence” to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus disease.

Earlier this week, Mayor London Breed issued a shelter in place for six Bay Area counties, including San Francisco, through April 7. Newsom’s order for the entire state will be mandated until further notice.

Essential businesses will remain opened within the state. This includes gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, food banks, farmers markets, and restaurants that offer takeout and delivery service. Businesses that must shutter indefinitely include dine-in restaurants, nightclubs, gyms, fitness studios, convention centers, and entertainment venues.

This decision to close restaurants, and keep people inside their homes, comes after Newsom claimed that roughly 56 percent of Californians are likely to get COVID-19.

Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has pleaded guilty to one count of stealing trade secrets while working at Google under a plea agreement reached with the U.S. District Attorney.

While Levandowski still faces a possible prison sentence of between 24 to 30 months, the outcome is much rosier than it could have been. In August, federal grand jury indicted Levandowski on 33 counts of theft and attempted theft. He was looking at a protracted legal fight and a trial that wasn’t expected to begin until 2021.

“Mr. Levandowski accepts responsibility and is looking forward to resolving this matter. Mr. Levandowski is a young man with enormous talents and much to contribute to the fast-moving world of AI and AV and we hope that this plea will allow him to move on with his life and focus his energies where they matter most,” his attorney, Miles Ehrlich said in an emailed statement.

Under the plea agreement, Levandowski admits to downloading thousands of files related to Project Chauffeur, the Google self-driving project that later spun out to become Waymo . Levandowski was an engineer and one of the founding members of Project Chauffeur, which launched in 2009. Scroll down to read the plea agreement.

He said that in 2015, prior to leaving to start his own self-driving trucking company, he downloaded 14,000 documents from an internal Google server and transferred it to his laptop. Levandowski specifically pleaded guilty to count 33 of the indictment, which is related to taking what was known as the Chauffeur Weekly Update, a spreadsheet that contained a variety of details including quarterly goals and weekly metrics, the team’s objectives and key results as well as summaries of 15 technical challenges faced by the program and notes related to previous challenges that had been overcome, according to the filing.

Levandowski said in the plea agreement that he downloaded the Chauffeur Weekly Update to his personal laptop on or about January 17, 2016, and accessed the document after his resignation from Google, which occurred about 10 days later.

“Mr. Levandowski’s guilty plea in a criminal hearing today brings to an end a seminal case for our company and the self-driving industry and underscores the value of Waymo’s intellectual property,” a Waymo spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Through today’s development and related cases, we are successfully protecting our intellectual property as we build the world’s most experienced driver.”

Levandowski left Google and started Otto, a self-driving trucking company that was then bought by Uber. Waymo later sued Uber for trade secret theft. Waymo alleged in the suit, which went to trial and ended in a settlement, that Levandowski stole trade secrets, which were then used by Uber. Under the settlement, Uber agreed to not incorporate Waymo’s confidential information into their hardware and software. Uber also agreed to pay a financial settlement that included 0.34% of Uber equity, per its Series G-1 round $72 billion valuation. That calculated at the time to about $244.8 million in Uber equity.

The plea deal puts an end to any criminal charges. However, Levandowski still faces a civil matter. An arbitration panel ruled in December that Levandowski and Lior Ron had engaged in unfair competition and breached their contract with Google when they left the company to start a rival autonomous vehicle company focused on trucking, called Otto. Uber acquired Otto in 2017. Earlier this month, San Francisco County court confirmed the panel’s decision and order Levandowski to pay $179 million.

Ron settled in February 2019 with Google for $9.7 million. Levandowski had disputed the ruling. The San Francisco County Superior Court denied his petition, granting Google’s petition to hold Levandowski to the arbitration agreement under which he was liable. Levandowski himself may not have to pay the money personally, as this sort of liability may fall to his employer depending on his contract or other legal quirks. However, Levandowski personally filed March 4 for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179 million debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50 million and $100 million.

Anthony Levandowski plea agreement by TechCrunch on Scribd

American Airlines today announced that it will fly a handful of cargo-only flights to Europe, using its standard 777-300 passenger planes, over the course of the next few days. The company says these flights will carry medical supplies, mail for active U.S. military, telecommunications equipment and electronics, as well as packages from e-commerce firms.

This marks the first time American is operating cargo-only flights since 1984, when it retired its last 747 freighter (one of those retired planes, by the way, was then modified to carry NASA’s shuttle on its back).

By default, virtually all airlines carry cargo on their domestic and international flights. American, for example, notes that it shipped over 400 tons of flowers from Amsterdam to the U.S. in the two weeks around Valentine’s day. As airlines started shrinking their operations in light of various travel restrictions and plummeting customer demand during the current COVID-19 outbreak, that cargo capacity shrunk, too, even though there is still plenty of demand for moving cargo between countries. As of now American and the other major U.S. airlines have suspended the majority of their international long-haul flights.

“We have a critical role to play in keeping essential goods moving during this unprecedented time, and we are proud to do our part and find ways to continue to serve our customers and our communities,” said Rick Elieson, President of Cargo and Vice President of International Operations at American. “Challenging times call for creative solutions, and a team of people across the airline has been working nonstop to arrange cargo-only flight options for our customers.”

For now, American only plans to make two round trips between Dallas and Frankfurt over the course of the next four days. “The flights provide much-needed cargo capacity for many of the airline’s regular cargo customers, allowing them to continue operating in this challenging environment,” the company says in its announcement.

Delta, too, recently announced that it would use some of its grounded passenger planes to move cargo as well. As airlines continue to grapple with the fallout of this pandemic, we’ll likely see more of them do this in the coming weeks.

If there’s one face of scientific authority in the U.S. in the throes of COVID-19 chaos, it’s Dr. Anthony Fauci. One of the world’s top HIV/AIDS researchers, Dr. Fauci has served in his post as Director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, helping steer the federal response to viral diseases like SARS, MERS, Ebola—and now COVID-19.

Today at 4PM Pacific, Mark Zuckerberg is speaking live with Dr. Fauci to discuss steps that everyday people can take help fight the spread of COVID-19. To watch the conversation, head over to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page.

The conversation is part of Facebook’s recent thrust to put COVID-19 information from established health authorities front and center on the platform in an effort to get good information into the hands of users while mitigating potentially dangerous misinformation that could worsen outcomes as the novel coronavirus spreads worldwide.

Wag!, the petcare company known for connecting pet owners with local dog walkers, has recently undergone a series of sweeping changes.

In late November, after I was named the new CEO, my management team and I began plotting a radically different path to profitability. We began by assessing our relationship with users. First and foremost, we recognized that Wag! needed to improve the way we supported the community, including pet parents, pet caregivers and their pets.

Next, we examined the company’s financial health and analyzed the competitive climate, investment community and direction in which the tech industry appeared headed. The time has come to share how this influenced our decisions.

Late in 2019, a lot of smart people began to note a philosophical shift taking place in the capital markets. Investors had begun to lose patience with startups that spent massive sums on acquiring market share, but had demonstrated little to no ability at creating lasting businesses.

We concluded that funding in some sectors would quickly dry up. Based on our analysis, we expect a growing number of startups will be forced to hew out self-sustaining business niches to survive. This assessment is partly what led us to conclude that accepting another funding round wouldn’t necessarily benefit the company in the area that matters most: providing value to customers.

A consensus formed after we took control, and found a constant drumbeat of bills coming in and payments going out, notably to Amazon (Web Services), Google (to help extend our brand), Facebook (to reach customers) and for our office space. These costs were growing faster than revenue.