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Hey, every Friday. This week, DJI and Insta3 declared a war on each other. Age verification became the new normal across large parts of the internet. And we also got loads of really interesting earnings reports. Welcome to Raf Checkout.
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This video was sponsored by Brilliant. Okay, for our first story of the week, DJI released their first proper 360° camera while Insta 360 announced that they are in turn making a drone. And there's some spicy details. Starting with DJI, the camera is called the Osmo 360, and it's a direct competitor to the existing Insta 360 cameras. It does some things better on paper, like supporting 10-bit color and having better battery life. But it also misses out on a couple of really nice features, like replaceable camera lenses and lens protectors, which the X5, for example, has. Both cameras even roughly cost the same with B&H, for example, listing the new Osmo going at 550 bucks. That's funny because DJI said that they're not officially selling the camera in the US due to some disputes with the US government, but I guess the retailers can just sell the camera on their behalf.
Anyway, not to be outdone, Insta3 announced that they're launching a new drone brand called anti-gravity, with the twist being that their drones will actually feature 360° cameras. About 2 years ago, they've already launched something called the Sphere, which was basically a clip-on accessory that you could put onto a DJI drone to capture 360°ree videos. But now they're making a purpose-built machine. Early prototypes have orally leaked via Quadro news on Twitter. And yeah, you can see one camera on the top and the bottom each. Rumors are that the drone will launch in August and will also be under 250 g, kind of like a DJI Mavic. And reading about all of this made me realize that, hey, just recently, Insta3 has actually IPOed. The company went public just a few days ago, and they collected 1.9 billion yen or about $270 million in the process. and they saw their stock price absolutely skyrocket, making their CEO a billionaire, at least in UN terms. If I had to take a guess, I'd say that they IPOed now because they wanted a big cash injection to fight what looks to be a straightup war against DJI over the next few years. I might be biased because I have of course been sponsored by Insta3 in the past before, so I won't give too much of a hot take here, but I'll just say that I think in general competition is great for the consumer.
Okay, and for my second story of the week, it looks like age verification is sadly looking more and more like it's going to become the new normal across the internet. Worst of all, the UK passed a new law requiring users to verify their age for accessing porn and other adult content starting on the 25th of July. Sites like Pornhub say that they've already rolled out systems complying with the new rules, but other services that also have to comply include Reddit, Discord, Twitter, Blue Sky, and many others. As usual, this means that users would have to upload their government IDs or add credit card information or something like that, which would then tie their real personal identity to, for example, their porn watching history, which is an insane thought. All of these databases we know historically have either been hacked or it leaked data or whatever. And having your most sensitive information tied to you like that and that going out in the internet is is crazy. This is like reverse GDPR. It's absolutely terrible. Thousands of websites have decided that it's easier to simply block visitors from the UK, while many others operating only in the UK have simply chosen to shut down completely. But don't worry, after the UK, online verification is landing in the EU as well, with five countries there now testing similar systems. Meanwhile, Google also voluntarily rolled out machine learning powered age estimation in the US. The company says that they will determine a user's age by looking at a variety of signals already associated with the user's account, such as types of information a user has searched for or the categories of videos that they've watched on YouTube. At least you actually get an email if Google has decided to flag you as a minor and you can then contest this. But then guess what you have to do? You have to upload your government ID, your credit card information, etc. I absolutely hate this.
Okay, and for our third story of the week, it's earning season again and we got loads of really interesting new numbers. To start with, Microsoft became the second $4 trillion company following Nvidia after a massive jump in its stock price. What drove that? Well, mostly Azure, growing at a pretty bonkers 39% year-over-year, primarily due to AI. Similarly, Meta also had a massive quarter after Zuck showed that they're going all in on AI. And after he released a blog post titled personal super intelligence in it, he says that personal devices like glasses is where AI will truly shine. Of course, just a couple of years ago, he also said that we'd all be living in the metaverse by now. He renamed his whole company based on that. So, you know, let's see how this goes. Anyway, OpenAI also claims that they've hit a massive 12 billion in annualized revenue and that they've also broken 700 million Chad GPT weekly active users, which is pretty bonkers. Meanwhile, also interesting was Qualcomm, who during their earnings announced that they plan to compete with Intel and AMD by making chips for servers by 2028. Apparently, they bring, for example, their Orion CPU cores from their current Snapdragon laptops over to the server market, which would be pretty interesting. And last on our list is that SKH Highix has now surpassed Samsung as the world's biggest memory chip maker by revenue for the first time ever. Counterpoints out that this is coming on the back of SKH Highix massively winning the high bandwidth memory race, which is the super lucrative new type of memory that is needed for AI processors. That said, Samsung did have one bright spot, which was Tesla announcing that it would buy around $16 billion worth of AI chips from Samsung, made in the company's upcoming Texas factory. That is a muchneeded boost for Samsung Foundry, which has been struggling for many years now.
Okay. And as for our release monitor, we start with DJI's ebikes, which are finally coming to the US. They're reportedly really nice, but they also cost $7,500, so that's quite something. Then a bit more affordable this week was Sketchers announcing a new shoe for kids that can fit an Air Tag so parents can track where their kids actually are. As long as they don't take their shoes off, that is. But yeah, still pretty cool. And also cool is the new Brilliant Lab Halo, which is a pair of smart glasses that only weighs 40 g, is open source, and includes a speaker, a display, a camera, and the multimodal AI agent that they claim can somehow see what you see while still being privacy preserving. The details are pretty sparse for now, but they're primarily targeting the hardcore tinkerers who want to, I don't know, build apps for their own smart glasses or something. So, if that's you, uh, I guess you might like this. And last in our release monitor, Hollland released the Lark Max 2, which is interesting for having wireless earbuds included that let you monitor what you're capturing with your wireless microphone. That could be pretty cool. As usual, the links to all the newlyannounced products are in the description, and we move on to the brief where we start with some leaks.
First, Sony Dixon revealed photos of what looks to be basically the whole iPhone lineup, including all color options that we'll get. I find that orange on the Pro model pretty surprising, but I also kind of like it. And those long camera squares that remind me a bit of that Pixel camera bar, for example, seem to be pretty set in stone now. What do you think? And talking of leaks, Evaks has also shown us a Pixel 10 series phone with a Maxafe accessory attached, confirming earlier speculation that the phone will come with magnets and will also support at least GH2. Then moving on, Adobe has finally released Windows on ARM versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Media Encoder. Some features like support for ProRes are still missing, but it's a big step forward for Windows on ARM. Meanwhile, also new this week was Proton launching their authenticator app. It's an open- source end-to-end encrypted app for generating 2FA codes that works both on Android and iOS, but also on Windows, Mac, and even Linux, and also has Cloud Sync support. That could be a pretty good alternative for those who want to switch away from, for example, Google Authenticator. and I think I might give this a try. But while this was announced, Dropbox in turn said that it would be shutting down its password manager. I didn't even know they had one, but yeah, that's too bad.
And then moving on to problematic news, Substack sent out a push alert to some users promoting a Nazi block. The block called National Socialism Today is uh not exactly subtle. And if you're wondering, I had to blur out the swastikas because they're actually illegal to show here in Germany, as far as I know. Oh, and ironically, I first learned about this from Taylor Lauren on her Substack. Hm, awkward. If you're wondering, my recommendation for a newsletter tool that doesn't support Nazis would be Ghost. If I had a newsletter, that's the one that I'd be using. Anyway, moving on, Epic won its antitrust lawsuit against the Google again. And as a result, it will now bring Fortnite back to the Play Store, presumably with their own payment system. And then, in funny news, Enthropic is now rate limiting cloth code because those damn users who bought an unlimited plan were never actually turning it off. Hilariously, a guy called McKay Wrigley on Twitter claims that he got a Mac Mini and he just let Claw Code, the AI agent, take full control over it, letting it do whatever it wants 24/7, which is both kind of hilarious and also definitely how we get to Terminator.
And while that was definitely a joke, you might actually be wondering how these AI tools and launch language models and whatever actually work under the hood. And if that's the case, I think you'll really love Brilliant's fantastic course called How AI Works, which takes this huge question and breaks it down into its core building blocks that you can not only read about or watch a video about, but actually experiment with right away through a series of super well-designed interactive exercises that are sure to make you actually understand what you've learned and also make it so that those learnings actually stick with you long term. Brilliant is an online learning platform that covers loads of STEM topics to help you think like an engineer or a scientist. And I think my audience would especially like circuits, for example, which helps you explore one of the fundamental building blocks for anything related to electronics. Or I also think you might enjoy regression and classification, which helps you make sense of a data on a real fundamental level. From engineering to math and more, they cover tons of really interesting areas. And their special sauce at designing courses with fantastic interactive lessons that not only make learning extremely effective, but also just way more fun than passively absorbing knowledge. To try Brilliant for free, visit brilliant.org/tfc org/tfc or scan the QR code on screen or you can also click on the link in the description. Once you do, you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Thanks for watching and see you next Friday.
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