Author: ian

Apple’s battle with Fortnite could change the iPhone as we know it

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(Angela Lang/CNET)

Sherlock and Watson, peanut butter and jelly, Netflix and chill. Since 2008, Apple has created that sort of inextricable link between its iPhones and its App Store. The company’s “there’s an app for that” ad campaign drew millions of people, who over the years have bought more than a billion iPhones. And since the App Store was the only place to get programs for the iPhone, millions of developers flocked to Apple too. Now the tech giant is confronting questions about whether it’s running a monopoly, forced into the topic by Fortnite maker Epic Games and Epic’s lawsuit alleging an abuse of power. 

On Monday, Apple will face off against Epic in a California court over a seemingly benign issue around payment processing and commissions. In short: Apple demands app developers use its payment processing whenever selling in-app digital items, like a new look for a Fortnite character or a celebratory dance move to perform after a win.

The iPhone maker says that using its payment processing setup guarantees security and fairness, and it takes up to a 30% commission on those sales in part to help run its App Store. Epic, however, says Apple’s policies are monopolistic and its commissions too high.

On its surface, the lawsuit reads like a corporate slap fight about who gets how much money when we all buy stuff in apps. But the outcome of this case could change everything we know not just about the App Store, but about how mobile transactions work on other platforms like the Google Play store. It could invite further scrutiny from lawmakers, who are already looking at whether companies like Apple and Google wield too much power.

“This is the frontier of antitrust law,” said David Olson, an associate professor who teaches about antitrust at the Boston College Law School.

What makes this case unusual, Olson said, is that it attempts to challenge how modern tech companies work. Apple touts its “walled garden” approach — where it’s approved every app that’s offered for sale on its App Store since the beginning in 2008 — as a feature of its devices, promising that users can trust any app they download because it’s been vetted.

Aside from charging an up to 30% fee for in-app purchases, Apple requires app developers to follow policies against what it deems objectionable content, such as pornography, encouraging drug use or realistic portrayals of death and violence. Apple also scans submitted apps for security issues and spam.

“Apple’s requirement that every iOS app undergo rigorous, human-assisted review — with reviewers representing 81 languages vetting on average 100,000 submissions per week — is critical to its ability to maintain the App Store as a secure and trusted platform for consumers to discover and download software,” the company said in one of its filings.

For its part, Epic has argued that Apple’s strict control of its App Store is anticompetitive and that the court should force the company to allow alternative app stores and payment processors on its phones. “Apple is bigger, more powerful, more entrenched and more pernicious than monopolies of yesteryear,” Epic said in an August legal filing. “Apple’s size and reach far exceeds that of any technology monopolist in history.”

Epic isn’t the only company making this case. Music streaming service Spotify notably complained to European Union regulators, saying that Apple’s 30% commission and App Store rules breached EU competition laws. On Friday, the EU’s competition commissioner said that a preliminary investigation found “consumers losing out” as a result of Apple’s policies. Apple will have an opportunity to respond to the commission’s objections ahead of a final judgment on the matter. If it loses, Apple could be slapped with a fine of up to 10% of its annual revenue and be required to change how it applies fees to streaming services, at least within the EU.

Apple is also facing increasing scrutiny in the US, where lawmakers earlier in April held a hearing with representatives from the iPhone maker and Google, as well as from Spotify, dating app maker Match and tracking device maker Tile. During the hearing, both Spotify and Tile argued that Apple’s moves were monopolistic. (They made similar arguments about Google too.)

Apple’s new Mac Mini is killing my Hackintosh

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Apple’s M1 chip is being hailed as a leap forward for Macs. But it’s death to my Hackintosh. (Dan Ackerman/CNET)

By Ian Sherr

One of my favorite nerdy hobbies is ending, whether I want it to or not. And it’s Apple’s fault.

Back in 2016, I was frustrated that Apple hadn’t updated its Mac Mini, iMac or Mac Pro computers in at least a year. The company pumped out new iPhones, iPads, AirPods and MacBooks at a regular pace, and I had at least one of each. But the desktop Macs weren’t getting the same attention. 

I wanted a low-cost multipurpose machine I could rely on for work and play for the next several years. But if I plunked down the $499 starting price Apple wanted for its Mac Mini computers at the time, I’d be paying the full amount for a machine whose innards were more than two years old. Not OK.

So I decided to do one of the nerdiest things a techie Apple user can do: I built a PC.

I bought all the parts I needed, including a storage drive, system memory and a graphics card. Next, I put them together in a rather generic-looking case. Then I tricked Apple’s MacOS software into powering it.

The project took about $800, many nights of squinting at computer code, and a couple of frustrated bangs on my keyboard, but eventually I’d done it.

I’d turned my DIY computer into a Hackintosh.

It’s not something Apple supports, and it may be a violation of the MacOS software licensing terms. (Apple declined to comment for this article.) But the result was that I had a desktop Mac computer on my terms. I’d wrestled control away from Apple.

What’s more, I felt like a winner. During the day, I’d move between my MacBook Air and Hackintosh for work, using all the specialized Mac software I’ve come to rely on to track my to-do lists, manage my calendars and find clever GIFs to use in idle banter.

At night, I switched the Hackintosh over to Microsoft’s Windows, which powers more than 73% of the world’s computers. That’s one of the only ways to play well-regarded virtual reality games like Valve’s sci-fi shooter Half-Life: Alyx, which CNET sister site GameSpot just named game of the year for 2020.

And if some component, like the video card, just isn’t doing enough, I’m able to upgrade the machine with little hassle. Nerd paradise.

Sadly, that all changed this past summer when Apple CEO Tim Cook walked onto his company’s virtual, livestreamed stage and said Macs were changing forever. Their microprocessing brains, formerly made by chipmaker Intel, were being replaced with Apple’s custom-designed M1 chips instead. Apple said it was doing this because the technology behind its iPhones and iPads are better-suited for Mac computers than the Intel processors Apple’s been using to power Macs since 2006.

“Advancements of this magnitude only come from making bold changes,” Cook said when announcing Apple’s first M1-powered devices going on sale in November. 

Apple’s remaking Mac computers, and it’s taking control to do it

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Apple is making big changes to the insides of its computers. (Apple)

By Ian Sherr

Apple has always sold its computers like luxury cars, highlighting sex appeal while promising they can get the job done too. Now, with new innards it custom-built itself, Apple is hoping to kick that appeal into overdrive.

This week Apple began preorders for its new $999 MacBook Air and $1,199 MacBook Pro laptops, as well as its revamped $699 Mac Mini no-frills desktop. The company says the new machines can run laps around their previous iterations, hitting benchmarks that, according to Apple, make them among the fastest personal computers in the world. Plus, the company says, they’re able to do that while offering better battery life and, in the case of the MacBook Air, without a sometimes noisy fan too.

All those changes, Apple says, come from the company’s new M1 silicon chip that it built specifically to act as the brains of its computers. The move is a seismic shift for the company, which for the past 14 years has relied on processors made by chip giant Intel. Intel supplies a vast majority of the central processing units, as they’re known, used by PCs. But, soon, it won’t be supplying them to Apple anymore.

Apple has spent more than a decade on research and development, and at least $1 billion buying more than half a dozen companies, to create its own rival processor based on the well-regarded A-series chips that’ve been powering its iPhones and iPads for a decade. Now morphed into the M1 for its computers, the chip, Apple says, doesn’t just compete with processors made by Intel, it trounces them.

“Every Mac with M1 will be transformed into an entirely different class of product,” Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji, said when discussing the chip at the company’s online unveiling event Tuesday. “With its unique combination of remarkable performance, powerful features and incredible efficiency, M1 is by far the best chip we’ve ever created.”

Apple’s move to remake its computers follows its long-established trend of taking increasing control over both its devices and the components that power them. Apple has already created custom chips for security, such as with its Face ID and Touch ID unlocking features. It’s created custom image processing chips too, for making photos taken by its phones look that much better.

Apple also makes the iOS and iPadOS software powering its devices, allowing it to finely tune the hardware and software for those gadgets, like the iPhone 12, which CNET reviewer Patrick Holland said got some of our highest ratings ever. “5G support, a new striking design, improved cameras and four different models all add up to make the iPhone 12 an absolute unit,” he wrote.

For many people, it was a forgone conclusion that if Apple could take over the chips inside its Mac computers as well, it could deliver a similarly crowd-pleasing experience.

“The touted improvements strike at the heart of PC buyer concerns: performance and battery life,” said Ross Rubin, an analyst at Reticle Research.

Tech firms face growing resentment toward parent employees during COVID-19

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By Ian Sherr

Silicon Valley had to change the way its employees work when the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close, businesses to abandon their offices and millions of people to quarantine in their homes across the US starting in March. Among the changes, companies offered flexible schedules and increased time off to help caregivers and employees in their ranks take care of their families.

But though the companies said they’d support parents at home with their children, not all managers and co-workers agreed. Over time, an undercurrent of resentment has bubbled up across the tech industry against those splitting time between work and family, and it’s spilled out in public on employee message boards, company chat software and on social networks. At Facebook, the pushback has forced COO Sheryl Sandberg, a parent herself, to defend the company’s policies.

“I do believe parents have certain challenges,” Sandberg said in an August meeting, according to a report in The New York Times. “But everyone has challenges, and those challenges are very, very real.”

Meanwhile, some employees at Apple, Facebook and Uber say they’re barely making it all work. 

More than half of 1,000 people surveyed by Care.com said they felt like they’d let down their colleagues due to juggling children and work during the pandemic. Of the respondents to the survey, published in August, 52% said they hide their childcare issues because they worry colleagues won’t understand. And 45% believe their career advancement has suffered because they’re juggling work and kids at home.

“Even those who have relatively adequate childcare, they’re struggling,” said Bo Young Lee, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Uber, which counts about 22,000 employees in its workforce. Uber’s management team has increasingly embraced a new mantra over the past few months, she added, as coronavirus cases have topped 26 million around the world, killing at least 867,000 people. “For a while, people thought this would pass and it would all return to normal,” she added. “There is no return to normal.”

As the pandemic spread, many tech companies expanded policies to help parents deal with the sudden responsibility of caring for children while also working full time. Some, like Google and Microsoft, extended paid time off. Companies like Apple, Facebook and Uber also emphasized willingness to allow for more-variable work schedules.

Those efforts allow tech employees flexibility to continue working, even as a majority say they plan to keep their kids home from school for the foreseeable future to avoid potential exposure to the virus. In a July survey by Blind, an anonymous social networking app for employees, which authenticates where people work using their employee email address, 69% of 1,053 tech industry workers said their children will stay home.

Some companies, such as Dell, Twitter and Yelp, are publicly embracing family commitments, regularly discussing the issue companywide and encouraging managers and colleagues to support one another. 

Other tech firms express the same sentiments to caregiver employees and to the press. But some employees say the companies haven’t successfully woven those feelings into their hard-charging cultures, which, before the pandemic, often included the expectation that people would endure long commutes to the office so they could be at their desks, working into the evening.

It’s led to surprising clashes within tech companies, where parent employees are learning that some managers and peers resent the benefits and flexibility parents are getting. Many parents are also reporting they need more time to finish tasks, in part because of the regular interruptions caused by children. A July survey of 1,726 active job seekers by the recruiting site ZipRecruiter found that mothers at home with school-age kids expect work hours to reduce by 9%, while fathers say they expect a drop of 5%.

Taken together, these new working arrangements have led some nonparent employees to accuse the parents of being treated better by management while failing to pull their weight.

One Apple employee, who isn’t authorized to discuss internal matters with the press, encountered frustrating resistance when asking for a more flexible schedule. The employee wanted to split, with a working spouse, the care of their toddler and their preteen, who’s learning remotely. A manager responded that the employee was expected to work full time, or not at all. “Unofficially.”

“I’m glad I didn’t take any of my COVID leave already,” this person’s spouse said.

The manager wasn’t following Apple’s policy, which the company reiterated is “to be flexible, collaborative and accommodating of every parent and caregiver on our teams.” “This is a trying time for everyone — especially parents — and we want to do all we can to support every member of our Apple family,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said in the spring.

In efforts to support employees, Apple’s HR team has been joining meetings throughout the company, encouraging people to reach out with any issues they might have. The company’s also worked closely with firms it’s partnered with for mental health services, ComPsych and Sanvello, to help people cope with the stress the pandemic’s caused. And CEO Tim Cook has also discussed the struggles employees and their families are facing in his broad communications with the company.

To be sure, not every parent is having these bad experiences, and many say their companies are supporting them.

Still, these types of experiences with rogue managers or toxic employees are unsettling many parents.

When the Boston Consulting Group surveyed 3,055 people across the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy, in March and April, it found more than a third of respondents were worried their performance would be unfairly compared with that of colleagues without family obligations. 

In Blind’s July survey, the number jumped to 62% among Silicon Valley parents. Facebook ranked worst, with 83 perecent of parents expressing those concerns. At Amazon, it was 76% of parents. At Apple and Google, it was 65%. At Microsoft it was 60%.

US accuses supplier for Amazon, Apple, Dell, GM, Microsoft of human rights abuses

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By Ian Sherr

The US Department of Commerce added 11 Chinese companies to its list of firms implicated in human rights violations, including China’s reported campaign against Muslim minority groups from an area of the country known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. At least one of those companies, Nanchang O-Film Tech, is listed as a supplier or undefined “partner” with nearly two dozen tech and car companies, including Amazon, Apple, Dell, GM and Microsoft.

The Commerce Department said the group of 11 companies that supported “mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, involuntary collection of biometric data and genetic analysis” targeted at Uighurs and other minority groups will face restrictions on US products, including technology.

“Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labor and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens,” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a statement Monday. “This action will ensure that our goods and technologies are not used in the Chinese Communist Party’s despicable offensive against defenseless Muslim minority populations.”

How video of MLK, Rodney King and George Floyd changed our view of police

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By Ian Sherr

Jody Armour remembers the first time he saw a video of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers in the spring of 1991. And the second time. And the third time. And many after that. 

The video of police beating King, an unarmed black man in a parking lot, had saturated the airwaves shortly after it happened on March 3. Newly launched 24-hour cable news networks like CNN played it on a near constant loop.

“Those were some of the first days that you could turn on the TV anytime day or night and see news,” he said. And at that time, when he was starting his teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, it was the biggest story in the country. “The cable news knew the images of that would be arresting.”

Three decades later and Armour, now a law professor at University of Southern California, is watching another gruesome video of police and an unarmed black man. Like King, this unarmed black man was filmed by a bystander as he was abused by the police. But that’s where the similarities end. 

King’s video was taken at a distance, and the bits replayed on TV were blurry. Today’s video clearly showed the victim’s face as he was pinned on the ground, wincing in pain, gasping for breath and calling out for his mother. And this video is punctuated by a Minneapolis police officer, leaning his knee on the man’s neck for what would be 8 minutes and 46 seconds. 

Unlike King, this man died in police custody. His name was George Floyd.

The video of Floyd’s final moments made its way to international TV, but that’s not where many people saw it. Instead, millions were introduced to Floyd through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. The horrifying video, shot vertically like so many TikTok dances and happy selfies, spread around the internet alongside hashtags for this generation’s civil rights movement: #BlackLivesMatter.

The digital age has transformed how information spreads around the world, and it’s also changed the reaction to another unarmed black man’s death. In years past, shocking images would fill TV screens, newspapers and hashtags around the world. When local police shot and killed another unarmed black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, thousands of people gathered there to protest day and night.

Unlike with Brown, who was shot at least six times, there’s video evidence of Floyd’s final moments. It’s hard to watch and leaves little question as to how he was treated.

Protesters quickly took to the streets as the video spread, marching in every major US city and around the world, despite the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected 7.5 million people around the world and killed 423,000.

Also unlike previous incidents, which eventually faded as the nation moved on to some new outrage, the prevalence of phone cameras at these protests has brought a steady stream of new examples of police brutality, keeping us focused on the fight to end racial inequality and to overhaul police departments as institutions.

As activists march, they hold signs asking if they might be the next unarmed black person to die at the hands of the police. Others ask how many more incidents haven’t been videotaped.

They remind us that if we weren’t living in the modern age, with camera-equipped phones in our pockets everywhere we go, we may never have known what happened to Floyd, Armour said. “What it makes me feel is that what we’re seeing through these cameras is the tip of the iceberg.”

Sony resets PS5 games event for June 11, promises $1 million to black causes

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By Ian Sherr

Last week, Sony postponed a planned event to show off new games for its upcoming PlayStation 5 video game console, due later this year. At the time, the company said it wanted to “allow more important voices to be heard” as people around the world protested police misconduct and the killing of George Floyd.

Now Sony has a new date for its event: June 11, at 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET. Sony’s pretaped event will focus on games, but the company plans to make more announcements ahead of the PS5’s launch sometime in the fall.

The company recommends viewers wear headphones while watching the video, because it did “some cool audio work” that’s harder to notice on a laptop or phone. Sony also said the event will stream at 1080p and 30 frames per second, much lower than the 4K quality the device is capable of showing. Sony said the video was reduced to ease the production process, since many staff and developers are working from home.

In an exclusive interview with CNET, Sony’s PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said last week was “no time to celebrate” amid international turmoil and racial strife. But for him and for Sony, the past couple of weeks since graphic videos of Floyd’s death while in police custody spread around the globe, have meant introspection about business practices, approach and diversity among his staff.

“There are moments in life when something happens around you and you realize that what you’ve been doing is either not big enough, not good enough, or just wrong. This is such a moment,” he said in an email exchange. “We are going to take a good hard look at how we behave as a company, and how we behave towards our community.”

Silicon Valley’s learning it can’t work tech employees to the bone during coronavirus

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By Ian Sherr

The coronavirus pandemic has pushed the world into a mass experiment in working from home. For some companies, self-quarantine for the public good has meant finding new ways to collaborate while navigating spotty internet connections, video conferencing etiquette, new apps and even newer security woes. That’s a no-brainer for Silicon Valley, where companies build apps and technologies to help power services used by hundreds of millions of people each day.

But with schools and day care centers closed around the country, tech companies, from Apple to Facebook to Google to LinkedIn to Uber, are facing a more challenging test: family. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a March conference call with the press that caring for his two young daughters at home with his wife, Priscilla, a pediatrician, is “a big change.”

The nonstop 24-hour work culture that led many tech companies to hire high-end chefs for free food cafeterias, offer onsite car oil changes and, in some cases, do free dry cleaning is running up against the realities of child care and other family care in self-quarantine at home. The unspoken agreement that all those benefits came in exchange for long and grueling work hours is falling apart at home.

Day care centers and schools around the country have closed, while nursing homes are sending some residents to live with family. That’s all put extra demand on working parents, who now have to split their attention between work, homeschooling, child care and family needs throughout the day.

Zoom said it’s tallied a 700% increase in weekday evening meetings on its platform since February, and a 2,000% increase in meetings on the weekend. While users have flocked to the service and social Zoom calls are now du jour, the numbers could also hint at an overburdened work force pushing meetings to out-of-hours when kids have gone to bed.

“The notion of the overwork culture in Silicon Valley happens because innovation is really hard,” said Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo, an adjunct professor at Stanford University. “But now that the climate has changed, we have a whole new set of issues.”

For decades, Silicon Valley sold itself as a worker’s utopia. The promise that if you work hard, you’ll succeed — with big salaries, employee perks and a stock option payoff that could make you a millionaire — is the driving force behind the always-connected work culture. But for families stuck at home, with no caretaker backups to speak of, many employees are being left to choose between caring for loved ones and doing their daily work. In California, home to Apple, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, HP, LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber and an endless list of startups, most schools won’t reopen until the fall. Meanwhile, nursing homes have been among the places hardest hit by the novel coronavirus, forcing some residents to move in with family members instead.

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You need that coffee now more than ever. Getty Images

Though tech companies are known for their generous leave policies, offering much more than the 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected family and medical leave mandated by US law, some Silicon Valley parents say the pressure has intensified since being stuck at home — and not just from their bosses. A parent working at LinkedIn, writing last month on the anonymous employee messaging app Blind, said that while their manager was compassionate about handling work and kids, “I fear losing my job if I reduce my work hours.”

Most responding co-workers were supportive and some shared similar feelings. But others told the author to “stop whining like an entitled baby” and that “having kids is not an excuse to work less.”

LinkedIn, known in Silicon Valley for its employee-focused work culture, said it doesn’t tolerate retaliation against anyone for taking advantage of benefits it offers, or for bringing forward concerns. It also offers employees a way to anonymously report any issues. 

The social networking company is also offering an additional 12 weeks of paid emergency leave to help its 16,000 employees manage during the crisis (Microsoft, which bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion, has made the same offer to its 151,000 workers).

“Many of our employees are having to take on additional responsibilities at home with children out of school or parents who need care, and we are supporting them,” said Kenly Walker, a LinkedIn spokeswoman. 

Employees at Apple and Uber who spoke to me also said they felt overworked without much leeway to take care of kids. And they aren’t alone. More than half of the 6,163 working parents surveyed by Blind earlier this month said they felt their work wasn’t being fairly compared to that of their colleagues during the crisis. As a result, 61% of them, including employees from Google and Facebook, said they’re putting in at least three extra hours each day to complete their work.

“For people who have a family, you feel that you have to operate as if you don’t,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies. She’s faced many of these struggles firsthand, sharing online about navigating life in the tech world while homeschooling her daughter. It’s likely this crisis will change how we all prioritize life and family, she said. It may also change the culture at companies that have historically bristled at remote work, such as Google, Apple and Facebook.

“I’m hoping this is going to help us afterward to be more flexible,” Milanesi said. “I’m hoping it will humanize workers more.”

This hospital is using Microsoft video chat to protect doctors fighting coronavirus

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By Ian Sherr

You can’t walk into the intensive care units at St. Luke’s University Health Network because of concerns over spreading the novel coronavirus. But if you did, you’d see something new amid the beds, medical equipment and tubes. It’s a device with Microsoft’s Teams software running.

Over the past couple months, the hospital network — like so many of us — has turned to technology to bridge the in-person communication lost due to the threat from the coronavirus. The virus, which was labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization last month, has caused 2 million confirmed cases around the world. Governments have imposed lockdowns, hoping to slow the virus’ spread and give hospitals time to treat victims.

St. Luke’s, which also calls itself SLUHN, was doing little with telehealth before the crisis. Its most notable initiative was a video chat device kept in the ER to help digitally bring doctors in other parts of the hospital to the bedside of suspected stroke patients. With the coronavirus, doctors needed to find new ways to treat patients without constantly changing in and out of layers of protective gear. 

“We scoured our network for devices,” said Dr. James Balshi, the chief medical information officer for SLUHN and a vascular surgeon. Now it has about 100 devices it can bring to the ICU and some other beds, using Microsoft’s Teams video chat software to offer patients a way to communicate with doctors whether they’re in the room or not. “A telephone is better than nothing, but it doesn’t come close to looking at someone and seeing their facial expressions — it’s one of the most powerful parts of this.”

Microsoft made SLUHN available to talk with CNET as part of a series of blog posts and videos it’s produced about how companies are using its software during this crisis. Among them is the cosmetics brand L’Oréal, which leaned on video chat software to help the company adapt its factories around the world to produce hand sanitizer.

Our sudden reliance on video chat has made apps such as Zoom, Cisco’s WebEx, Apple’s FaceTime, Google’s Duo, Houseparty and Microsoft’s Skype daily parts of people’s lives. For Teams in particular, that’s translated into more than 40% growth in people using its product over the past couple months.

This shift to video chat has brought its own challenges. In some cases, outsiders log onto public video chats for schools or governments and start spreading pornography or racist imagery. In others cases, experts are raising concerns about potential security problems.

Still, it appears our broader use of video chat will likely continue after the crisis calms. For SLUHN, positive reception by even once reluctant doctors has helped to make that case, as well as Microsoft’s compliance with medical privacy laws.

SLUHN has encountered bumps along the way though. Doctors learned it’s harder for some people, particularly Parkinson’s patients and the elderly, to download the app and set it up for their virtual doctor visits, for example.

“Not everybody has the son or daughter who can come over, especially now, and set you up,” Balshi said. It’s also another app patients have to deal with, on top of managing their electronic medical records.

Still, Balshi sees promise. The hospital network’s begun using Teams video chat for doctor visits too. It’s now notching about 3,000 per day. That’s half of what the hospitals normally provide, Balshi said, but still up from almost none before the crisis began.

“The reluctance and the uncertainty about it is gone,” he said. “Almost every provider in our network has had some contact with this now and has said, ‘Hey, we could do this and this works.'”

Google Stadia wants to be the future of gaming. So do Microsoft, Sony and Amazon

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Wondering where the console is? There is none. (Sarah Tew/CNET)

By Ian Sherr

And then there were four. Google Stadia, the tech titan’s new service that lets you play video games like you stream the TV show Stranger Things from Netflix, launched this week with high hopes — and immediately took flak for having few features, a poor lineup of games and slow response time. Next year, it’ll have another issue to contend with: competition.

That’s because 2020 will mark the beginning of a new generation of video games, powered by Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s next Xbox, both of which are planned for release in the fall. They won’t be alone.

Game streaming on any device, including smartphones, offers an opportunity for the tech industry’s largest players to jump into the game world, taking on established heavyweights Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

For Google, the entry point is Stadia, a streaming service that promises to use the search giant’s vast and nearly worldwide network of powerful computers to stream video games directly to our TVs, computers and phones over the internet. But now that it’s launched to mixed reviews, some people are recommending gamers steer clear, even if you can use Stadia for free after buying a game from Google.

“Until Google finds a way to loop in YouTube and develop truly unique competitive large-scale games, Stadia isn’t worth your time yet,” CNET Editor Scott Stein wrote in his review.

Still, the future promised by Stadia isn’t too far off.

And Microsoft has already started public beta testing of its Project xCloud gaming service, which offers 50 games, including its big new sci-fi shooting game Gears 5 and popular Halo games. The company also offers a subscription service called Xbox Game Pass that gives players access to more than 100 titles, starting at $9.99 per month.

In October, Sony revamped its 5-year-old PlayStation Now streaming service, offering access to more than 800 games for $9.99 per month, including its acclaimed action game God of War. 

And Microsoft has already started public beta testing of its Project xCloud gaming service, which offers 50 games, including its big new sci-fi shooting game Gears 5 and popular Halo games. The company also offers a subscription service called Xbox Game Pass that gives players access to more than 100 titles, starting at $9.99 per month.

Amazon next

One of the most anticipated entrants into cloud gaming is Amazon. The online shopping giant already sells video games, video game consoles and accessories. It also owns Twitch, a service that allows you to watch other people play games live.

But it has ambitions to do more, including a game streaming service to compete with Google, Microsoft and Sony, though it hasn’t discussed its game streaming service publicly. 

Amazon is planning to announce its service next year, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. It’s begun recruiting people from large game companies like Microsoft to help with the launch, as well as hiring for jobs in a “new initiative” within its Amazon Web Services team, which sources said is involved in Amazon’s future gaming service. 

“We believe the evolution that began with arcade communities a quarter at a time, growing to the live streams and e-sports of today, will continue to a future where everyone is a gamer and every gamer can create, compete, collaborate and connect with others at massive scales,” one job posting this month showed. And in at least one other job posting, the company said it wants to “drive innovative new use cases like machine vision and game streaming.”

Amazon said in yet another job posting that it plans to integrate its new initiative with Twitch and the company’s other services.