Reselling Apple At Amazon? Pony Up $2.5 million Next Quarter
Gyroscope Secret Supercookie / Huawei Without America / GM Connected Cars Get New Brain And Nervous System / FCC & Telecom M&A
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Cameron Faulkner at The Verge: iPhone gyroscopes, of all things, can uniquely ID handsets on anything earlier than iOS 12.2
Your iPhone can be uniquely fingerprinted by apps and websites in a way that you can never clear. Not by deleting cookies, not by clearing your cache, not even by reinstalling iOS.
Tuesday Morning Links from DSLreports
FCC Chairman recommends approval of the proposed T-Mobile and Sprint merger after New T-Mobile promises to cover 97% of the US population with 5G in three years venturebeat.com
FTC seeks evidence that Broadcom’s conduct harmed rivals in WiFi and network switch chip markets, broadening its probe bloomberg.com
Who Will Buy Sprint’s Boost? And Will It Even Matter? lightreading.com
T-Mobile-Sprint Critics Pan Pai’s ‘Policy by Press Release’, say conditions, spin-off, don’t make deal more palatable multichannel.com
Dish buys another chunk of EchoStar in all stock deal is valued at $800 millionmultichannel.com
FCC’s Carr & O’Rielly ‘inclined’ to approve T-Mobile-Sprint deal — Would give Pai majority to approve deal broadcastingcable.com
California man receives 18 month sentence for emailing death threats to Ajit Paitechspot.com
Samsung’s first 5G phone is out for Verizon customers cnn.com
US lifts Huawei ban, creates a general license, which expires Aug. 19, to restore Huawei’s ability to maintain existing networks and push software updates to handsets androidauthority.com
Great content over at DSLreports.com
Cameron Faulkner at The Verge: Can Huawei make a phone without US parts?
On Sunday, Huawei got some life-threatening news from Google. Following an executive order that gives the federal government the power to block purchases of foreign-made technology deemed to be a security threat, Google announced that it had pulled Huawei’s license to use Android. Yesterday, Commerce softened the blow by issuing a license allowing Huawei three months to send software updates to existing devices, but even so, Intel, Qualcomm, and a number of other suppliers may be moving to cut the company off immediately.
The company has reportedly stockpiled enough US-made parts to last it anywhere from three months to a year, so it will have some time to prepare for the crisis. But at some point that stockpile will run out, and Huawei will be faced with a difficult choice: either find a way to manufacture a smartphone without US technology or exit the smartphone business entirely.
What will happen next? Check out the rest of this article.
Jonathan M. Gitlin at Ars Technica: General Motors designs a new “brain and nervous system” for its vehicles
A common criticism of the increasingly digital nature of new cars and trucks is that all these new features are being shoehorned into systems that were not designed with features like connectivity in mind. The ubiquitous Controller Area Network bus (CANbus) first showed up in a new vehicle in 1991, long before anyone thought that it was a good idea to connect every new car to the Internet. To that end, on Monday, General Motors revealed an all-new platform architecture, designed with the needs of future-proofed connected autonomous electric vehicles in mind. “It’s the brain and nervous system of the vehicles, and it’s five times more capable than the one fitted to current vehicles,” said Al Adams, GM’s director of electric architecture and technology.
Adams is referring to the fact that the new electronic platform can manage processing up to 4.5TB per hour. One feature of the new electronic platform is support for much higher bandwidth, which means component connections of 100Mb/s, 1Gb/s, and 10Gb/s. Some of that will be helpful for the inclusion of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and Adams said that the new electronic architecture will speed the rollout of GM’s impressive “Super Cruise” driver assistance package across the automaker’s lineup. It will also allow for higher resolution displays within the vehicle, whether that’s the main instrument display in front of a driver or HD infotainment screens for the passengers.
The system has been designed with over-the-air updates in mind, an often-requested feature now that Tesla has proven the idea out. “Almost all the modules on the system have the ability to be OTA updated,” explained Adams. “The interface is much like a smartphone, and enables us to change the vehicle’s character.”
Nick Statt at The Verge: Apple and Amazon cut a deal that upended the Mac resale market
Six months after Apple moved in, small sellers have all but disappeared from Amazon Marketplace
When John Bumstead looked at listings for his products on Amazon.com in early January, he was waiting for the guillotine to fall.
A small online business owner from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bumstead specializes in refurbishing and selling old MacBooks, models he typically buys from recyclers and fixes up himself. But on January 4th, Bumstead’s entire business dwindled into nonexistence as his listings were removed from the platform due to a new policy limiting all but the largest companies and specially authorized providers from selling Apple products.
“You’d go to your current items, your inventory items, and just watch them disappear that morning,” Bumstead says of the fateful day the policy went into effect, confirming fears he first expressed in an interview with Motherboard last November. “I pretty much had all my inventory, but as the day went on, you could see them dwindle down to two or three [listings] as they took them away.”
For small sellers like Bumstead, who’s run his refurbishing business for years under the name RDKL, Inc., the deal means you can no longer sell new or refurbished Apple products on Amazon Marketplace, the fast-growing third-party seller network that now takes in more revenue than Amazon’s entire online retail operation. Some financial analysts estimate that Amazon Marketplace is worth more than double the company’s internal e-commerce business, or about $250 billion.
For US retailers big and small, Amazon has become the preeminent place to sell products, rivaled only by eBay and Walmart’s competing marketplaces and smaller, more product-specific platforms like Etsy and Overstock.com. Yet none of Amazon’s competitors offer the same robust logistics and shipping benefits the company offers its sellers, making it a top destination for online businesses.
Companies that want to sell Apple products through Amazon now have to meet one of two requirements. The first is to purchase at least $2.5 million worth of refurbished inventory every 90 days from Apple itself or through a retailer with more than $5 billion in annual sales, like a wireless carrier or big-box retailers like Target or Walmart. The second is to reach out directly to Apple to become an authorized reseller. Apple has yet to make its reseller requirements known to the public, but to become an Apple-authorized provider of repairs requires a physical retail space for customers to enter.
By cutting this deal, Apple and Amazon benefit while knocking out millions of dollars worth of business for small sellers. For Apple, the move to sell on Amazon and its aftermath highlight the company’s long-standing adversarial relationship with repair providers and resellers. Even those within the confines of Apple’s strictly controlled network have faced byzantine restrictions to acquiring proper equipment.
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