Apples Are Food Too🍎🌾
Google X is trying to feed an ever-growing world but all we care about are iPhones😀
Google’s notorious Moonshot Factory teased us last year with a project in agriculture and now, ever since last week, it has an official name and mission. According to their website, Mineral is a computational agriculture project focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales, with a focus on “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics and more”.
The project is combining data gathered by a robot in the field with satellite images, weather data, soil information and applying machine learning to the multiple metrics in order to identify patterns and extract insight into how exactly the environment is influencing plants on a day-to-day basis.
By mapping and imaging each plant in a field, growers can shift from the current strategy of applying fertilizer or weed killers by unit of land surface to one that treats individual plants, reducing both their costs and environmental impact when said chemicals into the surrounding areas. Tracking how the plants are growing over time can help growers predict the size and yield of their crops, enabling them to make more accurate yield projections, amongst other things.
These optimizations from the incredibly-wasteful processes we use today to a per-plant version will, no doubt, have a great impact on feeding an ever-growing population while, at the same time, reducing agriculture’s impact on the environment, the very fact that’s making it increasingly hard for us to grow food as the climate is warming up.
In the future, we’ll all get as excited about these kinds of efforts as we did for the Moon landing or the Haber-Bosch process back in the day, but, for now, we’ll have to settle for reducing the social networks-to-useful tech ration juts a little bit.
By this point, I assume everyone has seen, re-seen, and some maybe even forgot all about Apple’s event last Tuesday, so I’m gonna take the usual approach of not going too much in detail, but provide some of my thoughts on the product line from a high level.
HomePod Mini. This section of the presentation in particular is where we saw Apple’s prowess in showcasing the good parts of their products and breezing through the not-so-good parts. The Mini looks fantastic from an industrial design point of view and if the sound quality of its bigger brother is any indication of what we’ll get out of the smaller version, we’re on a good track. The pricepoint is also bang-on; if anything, they could have gone to $129 without a problem if you ask me, and have that $30 ‘Apple tax’ on top of Google’s competing product.
Now the flip side. The loudest thing that wasn’t said on Tuesday night when announcing all the audio streaming services the HomePod Mini already is or will soon be compatible with. While Pandora and Amazon Music were mentioned in the ‘coming soon’ category, Spotify, arguably the biggest competitor to Apple Music, was nowhere to be…heard. Sure, you can stream audio to the thing from another Apple device, but native support would also allow for voice controls, which would be nice since this is supposed to be a smart speaker.
The second, and final, shortcoming of the Mini touches on the previous point, the smartness of the thing. Siri remains, by any account, the worst voice assistant on the market today, with Google and Amazon leading the field in all categories. This was also the downfall of the original HomePod, being a great-sounding, but still dumb speaker, in a field of smart speakers didn’t really appeal to most people. Apple can only be so late to the smart speaker party even with their loyal fanbase so this better be the focal point of the next keynote come Spring…
iPhone. Speaking of focal points, when it comes to the iPhone presentation, the spotlight was definitely, and surprisingly, on 5G connectivity of both the regular and the Pro version iPhones. Why ‘surprisingly’? Well, because the deployment of 5G infrastructure, and therefore availability, is not controlled by Apple themselves. In order to fix this, they —in a very un-Applesque manner— resorted to mentioning ‘ideal’ and ‘real world’ performance whenever they mentioned 5G speeds. And mention they did, with the first part of the keynote sounding more like an ad for Verizon than a hardware presentation along with listing carrier prices instead of their own. This feels like we’re going back to an era where phone carriers were almighty and dictated terms on manufacturers, seeing this coming from the biggest company on Earth is strange, if not troublesome.
Enough about antennas, let’s talk phones. The main differences between the Pro and regular models of the iPhone 12 are the classic ‘compute and camera’ combo we’ve gotten used to in past years. The 12 Pro has a bigger camera sensor, a telephoto lens, a LiDAR sensor that helps with focusing, image stabilization via sensor shift and Apple ProRAW. If you’re a photography aficionado, the Pro way to go. If you mostly take pictures of food, go with the regular, the software will do all the heavy lifting for you.
The industrial design that borrows the flat sides from the iPhone 4/5 generations looks pretty good and a lot easier to grip, I’m glad we went away from measuring millimeters as a proxy for quality. The notch is annoyingly still there, let’s see for how much longer…
The differences in color options between regular and Pro continue to be a bit of a pain, with Apple still trying to market the more expensive version with what they think/decide are premium-looking color variations. That Pacific Blue they’re trying to make a thing this year just looks like the bumper of a cheap Toyota to me and who the heck wants to put a Gold smartphone on the table when people are building guillotines in front of Jeff’s house? But I digress…
I get it, stainless steel and aluminum must have different requirements when it comes to finishing, but the color itself shouldn’t be a problem and we’ve seen this in previous iPhones, just give people any color on any phone and limit the finish between glossy and matte, Apple.
If you’ve read some of my previous letters you’ll know I’m happy about the iPhone Mini finally making an appearance, now let’s just hope that demand will drive the company to make it into a Pro model in the future. Admittedly, there’s a battery life component in this becoming a reality but hey, one can hope.
The MagSafe tech revival and the ecosystem it enables have *a lot* of potential. Like they did with previous proprietary technologies like Lightning, Apple is providing buyers with advantages if they used their own wireless charging tech, like faster charging rates. Third parties will rival in creating accessories for MagSafe as they’ve done in the past, knowing the Apple buyer has the means to splurge on accessories, I’d be surprised if this doesn’t become a multi-billion dollar affair on its own with time.
I’m also looking forward to that speculated version of a port-less, definitely slimmer, definitely more waterproof iPhone in the future and I think the world is ready for it as well.
This is a long time coming, but Super Nintendo World will be opening at Universal Studios in Japan in Spring and it looks spectacular. Those Mario/Luigi pancake sandwiches alone are worth the trip🥞🥞
This tongue-in-cheek article from ‘TheDRIVE’ about phones having LiDAR inside them before Tesla puts them in their cars makes for some good light reading. Tesla’s CEO is a notorious opposer of the technology in the automotive world and reasons his thinking by saying humans already drive on vision alone. The idea of self-driving cars is that, at their peak potential, they’ll perform ‘better’ not ‘the same as’ the human drivers of today. It would be interesting to see what percentage of car crashes are being caused by low visibility today and considering a non-LiDAR self-driving system’s only hope of eliminating those is having fantastic vision sensors —like infrared or UV spectrum— or godlike AI that makes up for it; or a combination of both👁️👁️
The biggest gain for us as humans to replacing fossil fuels in our cars with electric vehicles is, without a doubt, the reduction of the carbon we’re putting in our atmosphere and the effects this will have on the health to our species in future generations. After that, if you’re a car enthusiast that relishes the styling of ‘70s and ‘80s cars, electrification will hopefully also bring back good-looking, well-proportioned cars due to smaller motors and modular batteries. After the Honda E, Fiat is also looking at that aspect with their new 126 Vision concept and I really hope much of it remains identical to what will probably be a new x00 line of cars parallel to the Fiat 500🔋🚗
This summer, the NYSE recorded the most crowded three-month period when it comes to companies going public and the news that an influencer is going to have an IPO for herself is the perfect crown on top of the year of the Lord 2020. Let’s wait and see how that goes then…💅💰
If you’re into your UI/UX, PlayStation showed theirs recently, take a look:
Probably the best use of a security camera ever…🏆
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