ENTERPRISE MOBILE NEWS OF THE WEEK: 12/6/17

I hope everyone has fully recovered from turkey and managed to maintain loving familial relationships despite any political talk at the dinner table. Having taken some time off, I’m a bit behind. But here’s the Enterprise Mobile News we found interesting over the past week or so.

1. Apple Is Ramping Up Work on AR Headset to Succeed iPhone. OK, I’m still not sure this is a good idea but there seems to be murmurings about Apple coming up with their own version of smart glasses. But I’m not buying just yet that the product will succeed the iPhone. Remember, Apple sells well over 200M iPhones every year. As we’ve seen with the Watch, you can be very successful with a new product category, but still be an order of magnitude behind iPhone volumes. I’m confident the same will be true for smart glasses.
2. Far from being crushed by Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, Instacart is seeing a major boost in interest in its services as grocers across the country brace to compete with that cutthroat logistics-wizard: Amazon.
3. The GPU is behind the massive improvements in Deep Learning. NVIDIA has had the lead, but can they hold on? Nice analysis from an investor and industry point of view here.
4. MacOS High Sierra Bug Allows Root Access Without Password. No sugar-coating this one. This was a massive security hole that seems inexplicably dumb and improbably got through what appears to pass for QA at Apple. If you’ve upgraded to High Sierra and updated from macOS High Sierra 10.13 to 10.13.1, reboot your Mac to make sure the Security Update is applied properly. Side note:
   Apple’s patch-fix also contained a serious glitch that causes the “root” bug would reappear upon installation of the most recent macOS system update.
5. Like most everyone in the tech sector, I’m pro-Net Neutrality. And the new rules that Ajit Pai at the FCC are contemplating seem like another giveaway to the telecom industry at the expense of consumers and entrepreneurs. But Ben Thompson’s recent Stratechery post has made me at least question my position. It would be much easier to swallow Pai’s rule change if it ALSO included expansion of competition of new ISPs into the markets to foster/ensure healthy competition.
6. Amazon Key flaw could let rogue deliverymen disable your camera. Just lovely…and exactly the reason that I never, ever considered turning on this service.
7. Google collects Android users’ locations even when location services are disabled. Don’t be…ah, never mind.
8. Google shares developer preview of TensorFlow Lite. This was one of the big summer announcements at Google I/O and now it’s finally available to the public. It’s a little more limited than expected as it only executes existing ML models but doesn’t improve models based on the new data being processed.