Tech News Roundup for July 3, 2020
With Canada day and Independence Day this week, there isn’t a lot going on as many people have taken an extended long weekend. Regardless, there were still a few things that caught my attention.
Telus Buying Smartphone Repair Company Mobile Klinik
3rd party phone repair shops are a dime a dozen, but the quality of them varies greatly. A small number of these shops are high quality, and an even smaller number have turned into a kind of “chain” of shops. Mobile Klinik is one of the bigger ones, and actually handles some in warranty repairs for Samsung phones.
As we hold onto phones for longer periods of time, anyone without an Apple device and/or easy access to an Apple Store really benefits from good quality repair shops like this, and in the absence of more companies doing this themselves, a good, reliable place to take devices for repair becomes very important.
Telus buying the company is fascinating to me. It has the potential for user who buy a phone from Telus to get superior service should they run into issues, and could lead to an interesting competitive advantage in the cellular market over Bell, Rogers, and Shaw.
Microsoft Shows off Future Tweak of Start Menu Design
In a very stark contrast to the UI overhaul that Apple announced for Mac OS Big Sur, Microsoft has rolled out a preview for a very slight redesign of the Start Menu in Windows 10. The change is very subtle, with a more consistent colour scheme on the start menu instead of tiles having a different accent colour.
This is not something worth reporting by itself but is notable because it shows the huge difference between the Microsoft and Apple approaches. Apple is completely redesigning the user interface of MacOS this year, and when they were ready to show it off, it was all done, and every bit of the operating system had been updated. It was first shown off in June, and will be deployed to every Mac this fall.
Microsoft, on the other hand, takes a much more haphazard approach to updating the user interface. They have been making minor updates to Windows 10 for years, leaving the operating system a UI mess with different areas looking more modern, and some systems literally dating back to the Windows 2000 days. What’s worse, a minor change to the start menu is being shown off in the developer build of Windows 10, meaning the earliest it will come to released product is in the first half of 2021. Microsoft does not seem to care about the fit and finish of Windows 10, and in a contrast to Apple, the gap is widening.
Pixel 3a Discontinued Before Replacement is Ready
After several news outlets noticed that the Pixel 3a was listed as “unavailable” on the Google online store, Google confirmed that the Pixel 3a has been discontinued. The Pixel 3a was released in May of 2019, so the fact that it was discontinued after a little over one year on the market is not overly surprising. Outside of Apple and Samsung, most companies discontinue phones after about a year.
What is notable about this is that there is not yet a direct replacement for the Pixel 3a. There have been many, many leaks about a forthcoming Pixel 4a phone, but that phone has yet to materialize. Discontinuing one phone before its replacement is likely not what Google originally planned, but I’d guess that they had a contract to produce phones for a set period of time, and when that contract ended phone production ended, and this discontinuation is a reflection of the end of the production run.
It remains unclear when we will see the Pixel 4a. With the disappointing sales performance of the Pixel line, not having a lower cost phone puts a pretty big hole in Google’s phone lineup.
Facebook CEO Says Advertisers Boycotting Will Be Back “Soon Enough”
In an employee meeting recently, Mark Zuckerberg apparently told staff that “my guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.” And honestly, he’s probably right. Like many social media campaigns, it is likely that most of the advertisers who are currently boycotting Facebook will come back when they see the advertising engagement decline. Facebook will probably make some token gesture to say they are doing something, and most will come back and nothing significant will change. Some may see it as a sign of arrogance for Zuckerberg to just say “the advertisers will come back” and I agree that it is not a good look. But the reality of the situation is that they probably will. That is as much of a statement about the business world in general than it is about Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg.
Even without these advertisers, Facebook is not likely to take a statistically significant hit to the bottom line. If a company like Coca-Cola stops advertising for a month and then returns, little will be accomplished.
I feel like it will take a number of companies saying no, they will not advertise on Facebook until meaningful change is made, and in an ironic twist, advertising they are no longer advertising on Facebook until the social media company makes significant changes to policy to make a difference.
Will any company do it? Probably not. But one can hope.