Thank you for tuning into TNTRadio.live on Wednesdays from 3.30pm to 4pm, ABC Hobart Drive on Fridays after 5.40pm, and Radio 2CC in Canberra on Saturday mornings between 10.30am and 11am!
Here’s the short version of what we spoke about on TNTRadio on Wednesday, more details on all of these topics are below, so if you want to know more, please scroll down and read on!
1. Apple iPhone 15 launch coming September 12 at 10am in California, 1pm in New York, 6pm in London, and 3am in Sydney on Sept 13.
2. Briefly – Google has announced the launch event for its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones is on October 4 in the US, plus when it has sales on
3. More importantly – Google celebrates its 25th birthday twice this month – what are some milestones, and what about the claim that Google is falling behind in the AI race?
4. Zoom launches a new AI companion that is free for existing paid Zoom users, so what will this new AI companion let you do?
5. Microsoft is set to remove WordPad from Windows soon, the free Word Processor that has been in Windows for 28 years, since Windows 95
6. CNET and Yahoo advise you should blur and hide your home on Google and Apple Maps, and show how to do it
7. Microsoft is also having a special event, which is September 21 for those in the US, and presumably September 22 in Australia, to launch a new range of its Surface tablets and laptops
8. China set to unveil a USB $41 billion fund to supercharge domestic chip production, with the latest Huawei phone featuring a 7nm chip, showing China is getting better, even if it is still far behind the Taiwanese
Longer version with context:
1. Apple iPhone 15 launch coming September 12 at 10am in California, 1pm in New York, 6pm in London, and 3am in Sydney on Sept 13 – full details on next week’s show!
Already there are suggestions the iPhone 16 Ultra due next year will have an extra camera that will take photos that can be better viewed in the Apple Vision Pro headset, but of course if you wait for next year’s phone, it will always be better.
Next week we’ll have all the details, but in short, the biggest change many want to see is the long-awaited shift to the USB-C charging port, rather than the Lightning port, with the additional news that this year’s “Pro” model iPhones will also support Thunderbolt speeds.
The latest version of the Thunderbolt specification tops out at 40 gigabits per second, which is more than 80 times faster than USB 2.0, 8 times faster than USB 3.0, 4 times faster than USB 3.2 and twice as fast as USB 3.2, so for those using their iPhone 15 Pro models for videos or other large files, and connecting to a PC or Mac with a Thunderbolt port means incredibly fast transfer speeds.
You can watch the iPhone 15 launch event live from 10am Pacific Time on the 12th of September (13 Sept at 3am in Sydney) at the embedded video below, and you’ll be able to use the video below to watch replays later.
2. Google has announced the launch event for its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones is on October 4 in the US, and October 5 in Australia.
Google obviously wants to temper excitement for the iPhone 15 launch by notifying people now that the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro range, plus whatever other hardware Google has in store, is launching on October 4 – here’s the teaser video from Google:
3. More Google news: The big news this week is Google have turned 25, with Google having launched on the 4th of September, 1998, although the company’s earliest roots can be traced back to 1995 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were at Stanford University.
Some Google stores globally will have a sale on September 12 to celebrate the occasion, but in the US, the discounts are normally saved for Black Friday, 2023, which is on November 24. Either way, if you’re looking to save money on Google products, or indeed almost any products, the official Black Friday sales are just 80 days away, with plenty of sale activity during and after that time.
In any case, Google has changed when it celebrates its birthday more than once over the years.
September 4 is when Google was officially incorporated, September 8 was its first official event, September 15 was when Google.com was registered for the first time, and the date Google now celebrates as its official birthday is September 27 in order to celebrate the number of pages that was in the first Google Index, which according to reports was 26 million.
Google reached one billion pages in the year 2000, and in the year 2008, according to a Google blog from the time, they stopped officially counting when Google had over one trillion unique URLs, but as of earlier this year, despite there being trillions of different pages online, Google’s index is estimated to contain around 30 to 50 billion pages.
There’s an estimated 7.33 billion smartphones worldwide, with half of those being Android users, but given many people have more than one Google product or service, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, says that Google today has 15 products that serve more than half a bullion people and businesses, and six other products that service more than 2 billion users each.
There’s also the claim that Google is falling behind in the AI race, thanks to ChatGPT capturing the public’s imagination, but Sundar Pichai notes in his official Google blog post the company Google has been using machine learning in its products since the early 2000s, and has been investing in deep neural networks and AI for years, with Pichai stating that when he became CEO in 2015, he helped Google should pivot to becoming an AI-first company.
Pichai notes in the same blog post that the AI revolution is just beginning, that there is so much more ahead, and that over time, AI will be the biggest technological shirt we see in our lifetimes – bigger than the shift from desktop computers to mobile devices, and even bigger than the Internet itself.
Pichai also talks about making AI more helpful for everyone and deploying it responsibly, so given the massive influence Google has over our lives, we should all as users hold him and Google to that.
And it certainly is true that the latest Google Pixel smartphones and the new Pixel tablet are extremely capable devices that are very strong competitors to everything Apple, Samsung and the rest of the tech world are doing, so we must hold Google to its promises that AI and Google will make the world a better place, but as Ronald Reagan said when speaking of the Russians – trust, but verify.
4. Zoom AI Companion is more than just an AI tool; it’s a game-changer for modern work. Here are some key highlights:
Zoom describes its AI Companion as a groundbreaking generative AI-powered assistant, available at no additional cost for customers with paid Zoom user accounts. This innovative companion is set to revolutionise the way businesses collaborate and enhance productivity
– Users can watch meeting recordings faster through highlights and smart chapters. Attendees can discreetly submit questions during a meeting to receive AI-generated answers, making it easier for team members in different time zones to catch up asynchronously. Post-meeting, automated summaries can be shared with attendees and those who missed the meeting.
– AI Companion simplifies messaging by suggesting context-based message drafts and allowing users to change tone and length quickly. Soon, users will be able to catch up on lengthy chat threads through generative AI summarization and even auto-complete chat sentences.
– Zoom Whiteboard users will benefit from AI Companion’s assistance in generating and categorising ideas, with the ability to generate images and populate templates arriving in spring 2024.
– Zoom Mail users will receive draft email suggestions, and by spring 2024, they will be able to add meeting summaries to Zoom Notes and summarize SMS threads and calls with Zoom Phone.
– Users will also be able to interact with AI Companion through a conversational interface that understands context across Zoom and select third-party apps, aiding in pre-meeting preparation, in-meeting support, and post-meeting tasks.
5. Microsoft is set to remove WordPad from Windows soon, the free Word Processor that has been in Windows since Windows 95
After nearly 30 years, the free WordPad word processor that is still in Windows 11 will soon be deprecated.
An excerpt of Microsoft’s recently updated deprecated features list states: “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
Will this have any impact? Well, you could see it as one way for Microsoft to push more subscriptions to its Office 365 suite, but honestly, Office Online is already free for those who want to use online versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Google Docs is free, we spoke about Libre Office a couple of weeks ago, and there are other free and paid options, even including WordPerfect, which some might remember from a couple of decades ago.
6. CNET and Yahoo advise you should blur and hide your home on Google and Apple Maps, and show how to do it
While Google Maps (and Apple Maps) are great ways to look and become familiar with a location before you even go there, CNET says “Street View is also a useful tool for stalkers and criminals. It basically gives anyone a free ticket to examine your home over the internet. Sure, someone could simply walk or drive by your home and do it in person, but Google Maps lets them do it easily from their couch”, and that anyone with a phone or computer can use it.
You can find out how to do this via the CNET article for Google Maps, while this Yahoo article shows how to do it for both Google and Apple Maps, so if you’re concerned about your privacy, blur away!
7. Microsoft is also having a special event, which is September 21 for those in the US, and September 22 in Australia
We’ll see a range of new Surface tablets and laptops across the various price points, basically newer versions of all the products they have on offer now, but I’m most curious to see whether Microsoft will launch a new dual-screen Surface phone, which none of the “what to expect” articles have spoken about.
8. China set to unveil a USB $41 billion fund to supercharge domestic chip production, with the latest Huawei phone featuring a 7nm chip, showing China is getting better, even if it is still far behind the Taiwanese
China is reportedly setting up a US $41 billion fund to massively boost the Chinese semiconductor industry, after US government sanctions stopped it from having access to the latest US technology.
This move also comes due to companies in the US and Europe also spending tens of billions of dollars to ensure they have local semiconductor industries too, because of the risk that the world’s most advanced factories in Taiwan could eventually be disrupted if and when China invades Taiwan.
Reuters reported that equipment for manufacturing will be a main area of investment, given the US having blocked China’s ability to buy advanced semiconductor and chip-making equipment.
The news also comes after Huawei launches its newest phone this month, the Mate 60 Pro, which shows the main chip used inside with a 7 nanometre processor, which is bigger and uses more energy than the 5nm processors used in the current iPhone 14 models, and two generations behind the 3nm processors expected for the iPhone 15 Pro models, but it does show China is catching up, and we do know they are very strong at manufacturing, with China clearly advancing greatly as it builds its own advanced chip ecosystem.
The Mate 60 Pro is also said to come with a 5G modem inside, something that Huawei wasn’t able to include in the last two generations of smartphones given the US bans, so China is clearly adsvancing fast!
