Apple discontinues original HomePod, will focus on mini

After 4 years on the market, Apple has discontinued its original HomePod. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple’s assistant feature.

The original HomePod was a feat of audio engineering that Apple spent over 5 years developing. In order to accomplish its development, the team at Apple built out a full development center near its headquarters in Cupertino, with a world-class development environment with a dozen anechoic chambers, including one of the bigger anechoic chambers outside of academic use in the US. I visited the center before its release, noting that Apple took it the extra mile to get the incredibly complex series of tweeters and woofer that built its soundspace:

But slathered on top of that is a bunch of typically Apple extra-mile jelly. Apple says that its largest test chamber is one of the biggest in the US, on a pad, suspended from the outside world with nothing to pollute its tests of audio purity. Beyond testing for the acoustic qualities of the speaker, these chambers allowed Apple to burrow down to account for and mitigate the issues that typically arise from having a high excursion subwoofer in such a small cabinet. Going even further, there are smaller chambers that allow them to isolate the hum from electronic components (there is a computer on board after all) and make attempts to insulate and control that noise so it doesn’t show up in the final output.

I found it to be one of the best speakers ever made for the home when I reviewed it in 2018. From the booming base and well-shaped nature of the tweeter assembly inside; the cloth cover that was specially shaped to avoid interfering with sound quality in any way; the way that it sensed the way that audio was being shaped by walls and other obstructions and adjusted its output to compensate. It was the definition of ‘no effort spared’ in the speaker department.

The major gripe for the speaker at the time was the $349 price, which was at the top end of the home speaker market, especially those with embedded home assistants. A price drop to $299 mitigated that somewhat, but still put it at the top of the pricing umbrella for the class. Apple’s HomePod mini, launched last year, has been well received. Our Brian Heater said that it had ‘remarkably big sound’ for the $99 price.

Apple gave TechCrunch a statement about the discontinuation:

HomePod mini has been a hit since its debut last fall, offering customers amazing sound, an intelligent assistant, and smart home control all for just $99. We are focusing our efforts on HomePod mini. We are discontinuing the original HomePod, it will continue to be available while supplies last through the Apple Online Store, Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple will provide HomePod customers with software updates and service and support through Apple Care.

Existing HomePods will continue to be sold but Apple’s website is already out of Space Gray. It will continue to provide support for existing HomePods. Apple seems to be betting on the mini going forward, which could point to their desire to fill every room with ‘good enough’ sound rather than to focus on the living room with ‘truly unbelievable’ sound. The HomePod itself never quite got to the level where it could act as a full home theater replacement, though paired in their multi-speaker configurations.

The HomePod research and production efforts will live on in some ways through Apple’s advanced audio rendering systems that led to things like Spatial Audio in AirPods. I quite enjoy the ones in my home and have yet to add any minis to the mix. Maybe a last minute hunt is in order.

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Daily Crunch: Apple announces a chip design center in Germany

Apple is making a big investment in Germany, Russia takes aim at Twitter and Roblox goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for March 10, 2021.

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for TC Early Stage 2021, a virtual event focused on operations and fundraising that we’re holding on April 1 and 2!

Apple announces a chip design center in Germany

Apple said it will spend $1.2 billion to create its European Silicon Design Center, which will be based in Munich and focus on chip design for 5G and other wireless technologies.

This is not Apple’s first facility in Munich — in fact, it says it already employs 1,500 engineers in the city, making it the company’s largest engineering hub in Europe. These teams were initially focused on power management, but have subsequently expanded their focus to other areas of chip design.

You can see a rendering of the planned building above.

The tech giants

Russia is trying to throttle Twitter — Russian state agency Roskomnadzor said it’s taking the action after Twitter did not remove banned content.

Adobe delivers native Photoshop for Apple Silicon Macs and a way to enlarge images without losing detail — Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs.

Facebook challenges FTC’s antitrust case with Big Tech’s tattered playbook — Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Why Terry Crews is launching a social currency — With the help of social currency startup Roll, Crews is launching his own social currency, $POWER.

EV subscription service Onto partners with Shell to expand access to charging — The partnership will give Onto customers access to more than 3,400 Shell Recharge charge points in the U.K.

Rent the Runway’s first iOS team launches Runway, an easier way to coordinate app releases — With Runway, teams can connect their existing tools to keep track of the progress of an app’s release, automate many of the manual steps along the way and better facilitate communication among all those involved.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Welcome to Bloxburg, public investors — As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share.

Dear Sophie: What are the pros and cons of the H-1B, O-1A and EB-1A? — The latest edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

Proactive CEOs should prioritize European expansion — FrontlineX Partner Brendan O’Donnell argues that the EMEA region is your best growth lever.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

NFTs are changing cultural value creation — The latest episode of Equity is all about non-fungible tokens.

Passive collaboration is essential to remote work’s long-term success — The adjustment to a fully remote workforce has been challenging for everyone.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt dives into tech’s reckoning with online hate — We spoke with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on proposed policy solutions and tech’s coming era of accountability.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Apple to invest $1.2 billion in silicon design center in Germany

Apple has announced that it plans to increase its corporate spendings in Germany. In particular, the company wants to set up a new facility in Munich, Germany. Called the European Silicon Design Center, the team will focus on 5G and potentially future wireless technologies.

The company said that Munich is already its largest engineering hub in Europe. There are already 1,500 engineers working there. In particular, Apple has been putting together its own team of engineers working on power management chips.

Overall, half of Apple’s engineers working on power management are located in Germany. Since then, Apple’s teams in the country have expanded beyond power management to work on other chip designs.

Now, Apple plans to invest $1.2 billion (€1 billion) over the next three years on a new building and new R&D investments. While Apple is partnering with Qualcomm for the 5G modems in the iPhone 12 lineup, the company has also acquired most of Intel’s smartphone modem business.

In addition to in-house chip development, Apple’s teams also work on integrating third-party hardware with its devices, such as the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

The company is also using this announcement to remind everyone that it is investing a lot of money in Germany as a whole. Apple works with many German providers, such as DELO, Infineon and Varta. Overall, Apple has spent $17.8 billion (€15 billion) with 700 German companies over the past five years

Here’s a rendering of the new building in Munich’s Karlstrasse. It should open in late 2022:

Image Credits: Apple

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Adobe delivers native Photoshop for Apple Silicon Macs and a way to enlarge images without losing detail

Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs, starting with the M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air released late last year. After shipping native versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw, it’s now releasing an Apple Silicon-optimized version of Photoshop, which delivers big performance gain vs. the Intel version running on Apple’s Rosetta 2 software emulation layer.

How much better? Per internal testing, Adobe says that users should see improvements of up to 1.5x faster performance on a number of different features offered by Photoshop, vs. the same tasks being done on the emulated version. That’s just the start, however, since Adobe says it’s going to continue to coax additional performance improvements out of the software on Apple Silicon in collaboration with Apple over time. Some features are also still missing from the M1-friendly addition, including the ‘Invite to Edit Cloud Documents’ and ‘Preset Syncing’ options, but those will be ported over in future iterations as well.

In addition to the Apple Silicon version of Photoshop, Adobe is also releasing a new Super Resolution feature in the Camera Raw plugin (to be released for Lightroom later) that ships with the software. This is an image enlarging feature that uses machine learning trained on a massive image dataset to blow up pictures to larger sizes while still preserving details. Adobe has previously offered a super resolution option that combined multiple exposures to boost resolution, but this works from a single photo.

Adobe CTO says AI will ‘democratize’ creative tools

It’s the classic ‘Computer, enhance’ sci-fi feature made real, and it builds on work that Photoshop previously did to introduce its ‘Enhance details’ feature. If you’re not a strict Adobe loyalist, you might also be familiar with Pixelmator Pro’s ‘ML Super Resolution’ feature, which works in much the same way – albeit using a different ML model and training data set.

Adobe’s Super Resolution in action

The bottom line is that Adobe’s Super Resolution will output an image with twice the horizontal and twice the vertical resolution – meaning in total, it has 4x the number of pixels. It’ll do that while preserving detail and sharpness, which adds up to allowing you to make larger prints from images that previously wouldn’t stand up to that kind of enlargement. It’s also great for cropping in on photos in your collection to capture tighter shots of elements that previously would’ve been rendered blurry and disappointing as a result.

This feature benefits greatly from GPUs that are optimized for machine learning jobs, including CoreML and Windows ML. That means that Apple’s M1 chip is a perfect fit, since it includes a dedicated ML processing region called the Neural Engine. Likewise, Nvidia’s RTX series of GPUs and their TensorCores are well-suited to the task.

Adobe also released some major updates for Photoshop for iPad, including version history for its Cloud Documents non-local storage. You can also now store versions of Cloud Documents offline and edit them locally on your device.

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Apple starts assembling iPhone 12 in India

Apple is beginning to assemble the iPhone 12 in India as it ramps up its production capacity in the world’s second largest smartphone market. Foxconn, a contract manufacturing partner of Apple, is assembling the iPhone 12 model — though currently no other iPhone 12 model — Pro and Pro Max, and Mini — in the country.

The move underscores how India is emerging as a big production hub for global smartphone makers. Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus have been assembling their smartphone models in India for more than half a decade and have increased their production capacities in recent years.

To attract global giants, New Delhi has been offering tax benefits to firms that locally produce in India and in recent quarters has significantly increased the perks.

“We are optimistic and looking forward to building a strong ecosystem across the value chain and integrating with the global value chains, thereby strengthening electronics manufacturing ecosystem in the country,” said India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad last year.

Apple began locally assembling select iPhone models in India in 2017 — beginning with the iPhone SE — though for the initial years the company’s contract partners locally produced only older iPhone models in the country.

Analysts have estimated that Apple, which launched its online store in India last year and is working to set up its first physical retail store in the country this year, plans to move between seven to 10% of its iPhone production to India as it looks to cut reliance on China. TechCrunch understands the figure is “wild speculation.”

The iPhone maker suffered a setback in India late last year after a violent protest broke at a facility in Wistron, one of its key manufacturing partners of Apple, near Bangalore last year. But the Taiwanese firm appears to have resolved the issues. It said last month that it was rehiring workers and will soon be resuming production at its facility.

“Apple is dedicated to making the best products and services in the world to delight our customers. We are proud to be starting production of iPhone 12 in India for our local customers,” said an Apple spokesperson in India in a statement.

Apple assumes just 2% of the Indian smartphone market, but it has grown in recent quarters. Apple shipped more than 1.5 million iPhone units in India in the quarter that ended in December, up 100% year-on-year, making this its best quarter in the world’s largest smartphone market to date, according to research firms Counterpoint and CyberMedia Research.

Unlike several foreign firms that offer their products and services at low prices in India, Apple has focused entirely on a small fraction of the population that can afford to pay big bucks, said Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at Convergence Catalyst. And while it took several years, Apple has carved out a slice of the market that is growing, he said.

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A bug in a popular iPhone app exposed thousands of call recordings

A security vulnerability in a popular iPhone call recording app exposed thousands of users’ recorded conversations.

The flaw was discovered by Anand Prakash, a security researcher and founder of PingSafe AI, who found that the aptly named Call Recorder app allowed anyone to access the call recordings from other users — by knowing their phone number.

But using a readily available proxy tool like Burp Suite, Prakash could view and modify the network traffic going in and out of the app. That meant he could replace his phone number registered with the app with the phone number of another app user, and access their recordings on his phone.

TechCrunch verified Prakash’s findings using a spare phone with a dedicated account.

The app stores its user’s call recordings on a cloud storage bucket hosted on Amazon Web Services. Although the public was open and lists the files inside, the files could not be accessed or downloaded. The bucket was closed by press time.

At the time of writing, the cloud storage bucket had more than 130,000 audio recordings, amounting to some 300 gigabytes. The app says it has more than 1 million downloads to date.

TechCrunch contacted the app developer and held this story until the flaw was fixed. A new version of the app was submitted to Apple’s app store on Saturday. The release notes said the app update was to “patch a security report.”

Despite a brief response to our initial email acknowledging the security issue, the app developer Arun Nair has not returned several requests for comment.

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Apple releases important iPhone, iPad, Mac and Watch security patches

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French startup lobby targets Apple with ‘privacy hypocrisy’ complaint

Apple is facing another privacy complaint in Europe: A startup lobby group, France Digitale, has asked the country’s data protection watchdog to investigate alleged breaches of EU rules.

The complaint, reported earlier by Politico, follows two similar complaints lodged in Germany and Spain by EU privacy campaign group noyb last year.

All these complaints are (directly and indirectly) targeting Apple’s IDFA — aka its mobile device Identifier for Advisers — with noyb arguing Apple should be gathering consent from users in the EU prior to assigning this unique device (whose purpose is, as the name suggests, to enable device tracking for ad targeting).

Apple’s IDFA gets targeted in strategic EU privacy complaints

France Digitale’s complaint also raises competition concerns, pointing to a looming switch by Apple — to require opt in for third party apps to track users — and contrasting that with a ‘personalized advertising’ setting in iOS which it says lets Apple track users and is switched on by default.

It suggests that default is contrary to requirements under EU law (citing consent standards in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation; GDPR).

The France Digitale complaint also raises questions over the level of data access Apple provides iOS users related to the ad targeting it carries out — saying users are only provided with “generic data (year of birth, sex, location)”, rather than fuller targeting data.

In a statement responding to the complaint, an Apple spokesperson told us:

The allegations in the complaint are patently false and will be seen for what they are, a poor attempt by those who track users to distract from their own actions and mislead regulators and policymakers. Transparency and control for the user are fundamental pillars of our privacy philosophy, which is why we’ve made App Tracking Transparency equally applicable to all developers including Apple. Privacy is built into the ads we sell on our platform with no tracking. We hold ourselves to a higher standard by allowing users to opt out of Apple’s limited first-party data use for personalized advertising, a feature that makes us unique.

The CNIL has also been contacted for comment on the complaint.

The latest IDFA-related complaint against Apple is a little unusual as it’s not coming from a privacy group — but a startup lobby.

Evidently, though, Apple’s decision to switch to requiring opt-in from iOS users to third party tracking (rather than opt out) is ruffling feathers. (The move also led to a publisher lobby group in France to file a competition complaint last year). The not-so-subtle subtext, here, is Apple is being accused of privacy hypocrisy.

Asked why France Digitale is making a privacy complaint against Apple, a spokesman told TechCrunch: “Startups play by the rules. We expect the world’s largest tech company to do so. We believe no scale-up can thrive without a regulatory level-playing field.”

“We are merely asking the CNIL to enforce the law. Privacy watchdogs investigate our startup members all the time. Lets them use their expertise on the bigger cats,” he added.

While the group has attracted some quick publicity with the complaint to the CNIL, under GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism the matter would have to be referred to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission — which is Apple’s lead data supervisor in the EU — which would then take a decision on whether or not to investigate. So there’s unlikely to be any quick regulatory action on this issue.

Apple’s Tim Cook warns of adtech fuelling a ‘social catastrophe’ as he defends app tracker opt-in

Apple takes aim at adtech hysteria over iOS app tracking change

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