New York Yankees center fielder Aaron Judge, #99, hits his 62nd home run to beat the Roger Maris home run record during the game between the Texas Rangers and the New York Yankees at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, on Oct. 4, 2022.
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Apple on Wednesday released a free new iPhone app for tracking sports scores, its latest effort to become a major provider of sports content and news.
The app, called Apple Sports, does one thing well: show sports scores from all the major teams and leagues. Users in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. can download it on Wednesday, the first day of the Major League Soccer season.
Apple services chief Eddy Cue said Apple designed the app to be fast and simple for multiple quick checks per day. It will stand out from other sports scores apps because Apple doesn’t represent a team or league and isn’t incentivized to engage users for long sessions, he said.
“You want your scores basically to be real-time. You want them to be really easy to get to. And nothing else is getting in the way. And that’s the primary purpose of the app,” said Cue, hoarse from cheering at the Super Bowl, in an interview last week.
Apple also bid for rights to National Football League games last year before losing out to YouTube, CNBC reported, and is expected to be a player in upcoming rights negotiations for the National Basketball Association. Apple, like Google and Amazon, sees major live sports events as a potential anchor for its streaming services.
This new app, which won’t come pre-installed on iPhones, is tightly integrated with Apple’s other Services apps, such as the TV app and News app.
For example, it will take the user’s existing preferences for favorite teams, sports and leagues from those apps, so when the Sports app is first opened, many will already see scores from their favorite teams.
Notifications and live activities are also handled by the Apple News and Apple TV apps, including existing features such as notifications for game start times or an alert for a close game the user is interested in.
Most game pages will include sport-specific information, such as who scored goals, which players are on the court or who’s on first base. Pages will also include live betting odds, but users can turn them off in settings.
The game pages will also often include an Apple TV button. That means the user can tap the button to view a live stream of the game. It works for sports Apple carries, as well as games on streaming services that are connected to the Apple TV app, many of which still require a cable subscription but will increasingly be available from over-the-top streamers.
“In an ideal world, when I’m looking at the Duke game, it says open the TV app, I’d like it to get me to the game of basketball,” Cue said. “And that’s what we try to do.”
Notably, there isn’t a special version for Apple’s new Vision Pro headset, which is the best Apple product for watching sports on a big virtual display.
Cue has spoken about Apple’s desire to fix sports distribution since before Apple had a streaming service. He critiqued cable channel guides in a 2016 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, and how it was tough to find the Duke game. In 2019, Apple gave Sports Illustrated a look into a war room the company built to monitor games and send notifications.
Cue said Apple does a fair amount behind the scenes to work with app developers and streaming providers to get their services working seamlessly with Apple’s services, for example. Apple’s goal is to make it simple and clean to find sports information, and eventually, seamlessly cue up the game with a few taps.
“As a huge sports fan, there’s never been a better time, there’s never been a worse time,” Cue said. “The best time is that pretty much everything in the world is televised in some fashion. But it’s never been worse. Because of the amount of services, the rights, the blackouts, the restrictions.”
Apple will also have features that will allow users to follow college basketball’s March Madness tournament in the app, Cue said.
Here’s a list of leagues Apple says it will support:
The launch of an Instagram feature that details users’ geolocation data illicited backlash from social media users on Thursday.
Meta debuted the Instagram Map tool on Wednesday, pitching the feature as way to “stay up-to-date with friends” by letting users share their “last active location.” The tool is akin to Snapchat’s Snap Map feature that lets people see where their friends are posting from.
Although Meta said in a blog post that the feature’s “location sharing is off unless you opt in,” several social media users said in posts that they were worried that was not the case.
“I can’t believe Instagram launched a map feature that exposes everyone’s location without any warning,” said one user who posted on Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging service.
Another Threads user said they were concerned that bad actors could exploit the map feature by spying on others.
“Instagram randomly updating their app to include a maps feature without actually alerting people is so incredibly dangerous to anyone who has a restraining order and actively making sure their abuser can’t stalk their location online…Why,” said the user in a Threads post.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to the complaints on Threads, disputing the notion that the map feature is exposing people’s locations against their will.
“We’re double checking everything, but so far it looks mostly like people are confused and assume that, because they can see themselves on the map when they open, other people can see them too,” Mosseri wrote on Thursday. “We’re still checking everything though to make sure nobody shares location without explicitly deciding to do so, which, by the way, requires a double consent by design (we ask you to confirm after you say you want to share).”
Still, some Instagram users claimed that that their locations were being shared despite not opting in to using the map feature.
“Mine was set to on and shared with everyone in the app,” said a user in a Threads post. “My location settings on my phone for IG were set to never. So it was not automatically turned off for me.
A Meta spokesperson reiterated Mosseri’s comments in a statement and said “Instagram Map is off by default, and your live location is never shared unless you choose to turn it on.”
“If you do, only people you follow back — or a private, custom list you select — can see your location,” the spokesperson said.
Tesla’s vice president of hardware design engineering, Pete Bannon, is leaving the company after first joining in 2016 from Apple, CNBC has confirmed.
Bannon was leading the development of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk. Bloomberg first reported on Bannon’s departure, and added that Musk ordered his team to shut down, with engineers in the group getting reassigned to other initiatives.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since early last year, Musk has been trying to convince shareholders that Tesla, his only publicly traded business, is poised to become an an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse, and not just an electric vehicle company.
A centerpiece of the transformation was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed to process and train AI models drawing on the large amounts of video and other data captured by Tesla vehicles.
Tesla’s focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex were meant to improve the company’s advanced driver assistance systems, and to enable Musk to finally deliver on his promise to turn existing Teslas into robotaxis.
On Tesla’s earnings call in July, Musk said the company expected its newest version of Dojo to be “operating at scale sometime next year, with scale being somewhere around 100,000 H-100 equivalents,” referring to a supercomputer built using Nvidia’s state of the art chips.
Tesla recently struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce more of its own A16 chips with the company domestically.
Tesla is running a test Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a related car service in San Francisco. In Austin, the company’s vehicles require a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat ready to intervene if necessary. In San Francisco, the car service is operated by human drivers, though invited users can hail a ride through a “Tesla Robotaxi” app.
On the earnings call, Musk faced questions about how he sees Tesla and his AI company, xAI, keeping their distance given that they could be competing against one another for AI talent.
Musk said the companies “are doing different things.” He said, “xAI is doing like terabyte scale models and multi-terabyte scale models.” Tesla uses “100x smaller models,” he said, with the automaker focused on “real-world AI,” for its cars and robots and xAI focused on developing software that strives for “artificial super intelligence.”
Musk also said that some engineers wouldn’t join Tesla because “they wanted to work on AGI,” one reason he said he formed a new company.
Tesla has experienced an exodus of top talent this year due to a combination of job terminations and resignations. Milan Kovac, who was Tesla’s head of Optimus robotics engineering, departed, as did David Lau, a vice president of software engineering, and Omead Afshar, Musk’s former chief of staff.
Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:
Loss: Loss per share of 24 cents.
Revenue: $61 million vs. $55.2 million expected
The virtual care company’s revenue increased 49% in its second quarter from $41.21 million a year earlier. The company reported a net loss of $5.31 million, or a 24-cent loss per share, compared to a net loss of $10.69 million, or $1.40 loss per share, during the same period last year.
“We believe our Q2 performance reflects Omada’s ability to capture tailwinds in cardiometabolic care, to effectively commercialize our GLP-1 Care Track, and to leverage advances in artificial intelligence for the benefit of our members,” Omada CEO Sean Duffy said in a release.
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For its full year, Omada expects to report revenue between $235 million to $241 million, while analysts were expecting $222 million. The company said it expects to report an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9 million to $5 million for the full year, while analysts polled by FactSet expected a wider loss of $20.2 million.
Omada, founded in 2012, offers virtual care programs to support patients with chronic conditions like prediabetes, diabetes and hypertension. The company describes its approach as a “between-visit care model” that is complementary to the broader health-care ecosystem.
The stock opened at $23 in its debut on the Nasdaq in June. At market close on Thursday, shares closed at $19.46.
Omada said it finished its second quarter with 752,000 total members, up 52% year over year.
The company will discuss the results during its quarterly call with investors at 4:30 p.m. ET.