During its developer event on Monday, Apple announced that anyone — including Android and Windows users — will soon be able to join FaceTime calls.
The feature, which will roll out this fall, could help Apple keep customers from defecting to competing video chat apps like Zoom or Microsoft Teams when they need to video chat with friends and colleagues who aren’t on an Apple device.
Apple isn’t launching an Android FaceTime app, though. Instead, it will let you schedule and share FaceTime calls using a unique web link. Once someone receives that link, whether on Windows or Android, they’ll be able to jump in and participate in the call. Apple said it’s still end-to-end encrypted so it’s still private.
People who want to join a FaceTime call just need to be running the latest version of Google’s Chrome or Microsoft’s Edge web browser, according to Apple’s website.
People will still need an Apple device to start the call, or to partake in some of the new features Apple announced for FaceTime on Monday, like watching a movie together or listening to music, which may require specific Apple apps depending on what you’re trying to do.
Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in a memo Wednesday that Google is restructuring its finance organization, a move that will include layoffs and relocations, as the company pushes resources to favor investments in artificial intelligence.
“The tech sector is in the midst of a tremendous platform shift with Al,” Porat wrote in the memo, obtained by CNBC, that was sent to employees in finance. “As a company, this means we have the opportunity to make more helpful products for billions of users and provide faster solutions to our customers, but it also means we collectively have to make tough decisions, including how and where we work to align with our highest priority areas.”
The latest cuts follow a broader effort by Google to rearrange its workforce and resources to accommodate further investment in new technologies such as AI as advertising growth slows. CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in January that more job cuts were likely coming in 2024, though he did not specify which teams would be affected.
The restructuring will affect finance teams domestically and abroad, including in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Porat noted.
Porat also wrote that the company would create “hubs” for more centralized operations including in Bangalore, Mexico City, Dublin, Chicago and Atlanta. The company plans to maintain a significant presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, she noted.
“Over the past year, we have talked about creating hubs of Fin’ooglers around the world that are vibrant and have a strong culture,” Porat wrote. “This strategy will help us be a more efficient organization and enables us to run 24 hours a day while respecting Fin’ooglers worktimes.”
Fin’oogler is the company’s term for a Google employee in finance.
Porat ended her note saying, “We are sad to say goodbye to some talented teammates and friends we care about, and we know this change is difficult.”
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.”
Workers at Carl Zeiss ZMT are seen outside giant vacuum chambers where optical systems for ASML’s new High NA EUV tool are tested.
ASML
Chip stocks fell on Wednesday after ASML, a key developer of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, said that bookings fell by 61% sequentially during the first quarter, a steeper drop than investors had expected.
AMD’s stock fell over nearly 6%, Nvidia shares fell over 3%, Intel shares fell under 2% and Qualcomm was off over 2%. But the biggest drop affected chip technology firm Arm, which was trading nearly 12% lower on Wednesday.
ASML fell over 7% on a day when the entire S&P 500 index was only down less than 1%.
ASML is essentially the only supplier of machines that are needed to build the most advanced chips in the world, which often cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. The Dutch company shipped 449 “lithography” machines in 2023, and its main customers include the world’s top processor foundries: TSMC, Samsung and Intel.
Its top two customers accounted for over half of its 2023 sales. Sales were down in Taiwan and South Korea, where TSMC and Samsung are based, respectively.
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Foundries physically manufacture the chips that companies like Nvidia or Apple design, so any sign that they are buying less equipment could suggest a downturn in the deeply cyclical semiconductor industry, which could then impact the sales of chip companies to end customers. And since licensing companies such as Arm book a few cents of revenue whenever a chip is made using their technology, fewer sales of manufacturing machines could signal fewer chips coming to market overall.
Total bookings for ASML’s machines fell 4% year-over-year, and CEO Peter Wennink said in a statement that he expects the second half of 2024 to be stronger than the first half as the semiconductor industry manages a “recovery from the downturn,” adding that the company was in a “transition year.”
“You know it’s pretty clear that there’s a few usual suspects absent in the the order intake,” Wennink said on a call with analysts.
Wennink will retire at the end of the month, he said on the earnings call. He will be replaced by Christophe Fouquet, current chief business officer.
Wennink said that he expected companies building foundries in the U.S., such as Intel and TSMC, to put in more orders for lithography machines later this year. ASML also said that it expected that government subsidies for chip factories, such as the CHIPS Act in the U.S., would boost its sales. The company didn’t say how export controls on China were affecting its business.
“If you look at the announced plans of some of our larger customers, it’s pretty clear that in the next couple of quarters, significant orders need to come in,” Wennink said.
A woman uses a dash cart during her grocery-shopping at a Whole Foods store as Amazon launches smart shopping carts at Whole Foods stores in San Mateo, California, United States on February 25, 2024. The smart shopping cart makes grocery shopping quicker by allowing customers to scan products right into their cart as they shop and then skip the checkout line.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
Amazon will begin selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers, the company said Wednesday, marking its latest bid to turn its Dash Cart technology into a service.
A handful of Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market stores located in Kansas and Missouri are testing the smart grocery carts, which track and tally up items while customers shop, Amazon said.
Amazon launched the Dash Cart in 2020 at its Fresh supermarket chain before adding it to select Whole Foods stores. They use a combination of computer vision and sensors to identify items as they’re placed in bags inside the cart. As shoppers add and remove items, a display on the cart adjusts the total price in real time.
Amazon is following a similar playbook previously deployed for its “Just Walk Out” cashier-less technology. Just Walk Out was first conceived for use in Amazon’s Go convenience stores, until Amazon began selling the system to third-party retailers in airports, stadiums, hospitals and other venues.
While it’s signed up more third-party Just Walk Out users, Amazon has pulled the technology from many of its own grocery stores. Earlier this month, Amazon said it would scrap Just Walk Out at some Fresh stores, and the two Whole Foods locations where it was installed. The company’s Go convenience stores and smaller Fresh stores in the U.K. will continue to use the technology, while it will expand Dash Carts in its U.S. Fresh stores.
Amazon teams working on Just Walk Out, Dash Carts and other physical store technologies were among those hit by layoffs earlier this month.
On Wednesday, Amazon said it has “strong conviction that Just Walk Out technology will be the future in stores that have a curated selection where customers can pop in, grab the small number of items they need, and simply walk out.”
Just Walk Out relies on an array of cameras and sensors throughout the store that monitor which items shoppers pick up and charge them automatically when they leave. Amazon and other start-ups that have developed similar cashier-less checkout systems were slow to launch them in larger format stores, originally launching the systems in convenience marts, due to the complex and expensive technology involved.
Those systems came under scrutiny earlier this month after reports from Gizmodo and others claimed Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology relied on human moderators who “watched you as you shopped.” Many of the reports cited a May 2023 story from The Information which said Amazon uses roughly 1,000 employees in India to review JWO transactions and label footage to help train the AI models that make it work.
Amazon said reports that workers watched customers from afar are “untrue,” though it conceded that human staffers are responsible for labeling and annotating shopping data.
“Associates don’t watch live video of shoppers to generate receipts — that’s taken care of automatically by the computer vision algorithms,” the company said. “This is no different than any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human reviewers are common.”