iPhone Release Now Late October; Autonomous Cars-MIT Says 10 More Years; Plex Bows 80 Free Channels in Live TV Service; Microsoft Revenue up 13% Thanks to Cloud

In a totally unsurprising rumor, Apple probably won’t launch its new iPhone line until late October. Macrumors.com reports that Mac Otakara is making that prediction based on sources in the supply chain. Most still think Apple will have an event around the third week of September announcing the phones. They have delayed models this late before (albeit not all or most of them.) The iPhone XR wasn’t available until late October. Unfortunately, the October date will just be for the LTE phones…the 5G models won’t drop until November.

Bad news if you were counting on your car to effortlessly chauffeur you around soon…an MIT task force now predicts we are at least 10 years away from fully autonomous vehicles. I will pause for you to have a ‘sad.’ ________ According to venturebeat.com, MIT launched a Task Force on the Work of the Future, which was an ‘institute wide’ effort to study the evolution of jobs during what the university terms ‘an age of innovation.’

In addition to technical challenges, the group points to cost as a barrier to adaption. The complicated sensor array autonomous vehicles require and powerful computers (which won’t be built at the type of mass volume as for example, advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS) which prices the vehicles up substantially. The delay due to expenses doesn’t just apply to personal vehicles: One case study found that robo-taxis would struggle to remain cost-competitive with personal vehicle ownership in San Francisco due to expenditures on remote operators, licensing, insurance, maintenance, and other systems.

They DO see autonomous over the road trucks making inroads sooner…partly to the shortage of drivers, and partly because the driverless trucks could go from hub to hub, and then could be taken over by actual human drivers for the last few miles.

Plex has unveiled 80 free channels in its live TV service…the majority of which are available worldwide. Techcrunch.com says the channel lineup include Reuters TV, Yahoo Finance, Toon Goggles, Kidoodle TV, KidsFlix, fubo Sports Network, Cooking Panda, DrinkTV, IGN TV, AFV Family, Tastemade, Revry, FailArmy, Dove Channel, Docurama, The Pet Collective, WeatherSpy, Made in Hollywood, and others. Oooh, you can also get the Bob Ross Channel, so you can binge on ‘happy little trees’ to your hearts content! You can only tune in and watch the live TV shows…you can’t record the shows or movies.

The pandemic has caused havoc in many lives and business sectors, but some people are making bank…Amazon, mask makers, and now Microsoft has announced revenue up 13% to $38 billion due to cloud usage and gaming…all attributable to the coronavirus. Geekwire.com reports that Xbox content and services revenue was up 68% for the quarter.

Office software licensing and LinkedIn took hits due to the slowdown in the economy, however. Microsoft profits were off 15% at $11.2 billion, but that included a $450 million hit from closing retail stores and they had an unusual $2.6 billion tax benefit in the prior year’s quarter.