Technology

Apple had big plans for 2020.

The year began with a major Mac and iPhone introduction in the spring, sped forward with a little more Mac and further revelations around AirPods and services, with a major iPhone upgrade and introduction of an all-new ARM-powered Mac product at the end of the year.

Next year was going to be even bigger.

Not business as usual

Everyone on our planet now knows that business is not going on as usual and won&t be for a while.

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Pressure from the global pandemic has broadband companies loosening the arbitrary restrictions on the connections users pay for — and this may be the beginning of the end for the data caps we&ve lived in fear of for decades. Herewhy.

The coronavirus threat and official policies of &social distancing& are leading millions to stay home, doing meetings via video chat and probably watching Netflix and YouTube the rest of the time. That means a big uptick in bytes going through the tubes, both simultaneously and cumulatively.

ISPs, leery of repeating Verizonmemorable gaffe of cutting off service during an emergency, are proposing a variety of user-friendly changes to their policies. Comcast is boosting the bandwidth of its low-income Internet Essentials customers to levels that actually qualify as broadband under FCC rules. AT-T is suspending data caps for all its customers until further notice. Verizon has added $500 million to its 5G rollout plans. Wait, how does that help? Unclear, but the company &stands ready& for increases in traffic. (Disclosure: Verizon Media owns TechCrunch but this does not affect our editorial coverage.)

Elsewhere in the world ISPs are taking similar actions, either voluntarily or at the request of the state. In India, for instance, ACT Fibernet has bumped everyone up to 300 Mbps for no cost.

There are two simple truths at play here.

The first is that any company that sends its subscriber a $150 overage fee because they had to work from home for a month and ran over their data cap is going to be radioactive. The optics on that are so bad that my guess is most companies are quietly setting forgiveness policies in place to prevent it from happening — though of course it probably will anyway.

The second is that these caps are completely unnecessary, existing only as a way to squeeze more money from subscribers. Data caps just don&t matter any more. As I pointed out during the whole zero-rating debacle, the very fact that the limits can be lifted at will or certain high-traffic categories (such as a broadband companyown streaming TV channels) can be exempted fundamentally beggars the concept of these caps.

Think about it: If the internet provider can even temporarily lift the data caps, then there is definitively enough capacity for the network to be used without those caps. If thereenough capacity, then why did the caps exist in the first place?

Answer: Because they make money.

As with other nonsensical and aggravating fees and practices, ISPs get away with this because they amount to regional monopolies or duopolies and are all running the same basic set of grifts for extra cash on top of your subscription fee.

That may be changing with the coronavirus, because after this very public exception to them it will be obvious to everyone that there is no reason for the caps to exist — including the FCC.

For years ISPs have made excuses that certain &bad actors& and superusers would abuse the system and suck up all the internet, causing congestion and slowdowns for everyone else. Unsurprisingly, this never actually happened, or if it did, it happened many, many years ago when broadband was in its infancy and it was possible to hog the line in your neighborhood.

Now, with 100-megabit and gigabit connections becoming more common by the month (to those on the right side of the digital divide, anyway), you&d be hard pressed to max out your own connection, let alone everyone else&s. In fact, the only person who would notice you&d eaten up 50 times more data than your neighbor would be your ISP.

Yet, strangely, if you were to use this high-speed connection steadily, you&d be punished on extraordinarily short notice. Comcastgigabit data plans, for instance, come with a 1-terabye cap. At top speed, you&d hit it in less than three hours. Doesn&t make a lot of sense, does it?

These facts will be material if, in a couple months, the ISPs attempt to re-establish data caps. If the entire country was using the hell out of their connection for months with no ill effects — and no ISP will admit that their superior network couldn&t handle it — why should there be limits at all?

Of course, this is only speculation for now. But once someone like Commissioner Rosenworcel starts talking publicly about this sort of thing, it tends to only go forward, absent serious opposition by the opposing party or industry groups. When it comes to data caps, ithard for anyone to justify their continued existence, and the coronavirus situation will only make this more clear.

Crucially, once it becomes clear that data caps are on the outs, it will suddenly become the cool new idea that simultaneously occurs to every ISP that a few months ago was happy to collect overages. I can picture the ad copy now: &What data caps? Binge care-free with the new Freedom Plus plan from AT-T.& &Unlimited data — yes, we mean it.&

Well, they can call it whatever they want, as long as itfree and the limits are lifted — the way it should have been all this time.

After Microsoft gave all customers control over when they upgrade Windows 10, the majority of users decided they didn't need a twice-annual refresh, data shows.

According to metrics vendor AdDuplex, once Microsoft let users of Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro determine the cadence of OS upgrades, each upgrade's increase siphoned more users from the version of 12 months before than it did from the upgrade's immediate predecessor.

For example, Windows 10 version 1903 climbed from 11.4% of all versions in July 2019 to 33% in August. Of the 21.6-percentage point increase, 20.6 points — representing 95% of the total — came at the expense of Windows 10 1803, the feature upgrade issued a year earlier. Just 1 percentage point, or about 5%, of the declines that fueled the increase of Windows 10 1903 originated with Windows 10 1809.

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Epic Games announced today that itbuying Cubic Motion,a computer vision startup thatbeen building out a platform for capturing more realistic facial animations with a complex camera rig and software platform.

The game studio behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine has already done plenty of work with the UK-based startup, creating a number of tech demos over the past several years that have centered on translating an actorfacial movements to a digital character in real-time. The startupPersona product which launched last year bundles both its software and motion capture hardware rig.

Cubic Motiontechnology has been used in recent blockbuster gaming titles like Sony Interactive EntertainmentGod of War and Insomniac Games& MarvelSpider-Man.

The startup raised just over $22 million in funding from NorthEdge Capital. Terms of the deal weren&t disclosed. The startup will continue serving existing customers while also accelerating integrations between the companytech and Unreal Engine, the companies said in a press release.

While Epic Games and competitor Unity continue to court large game developers, acquisitions like this signify hopes that the real-time game engines will infiltrate industries outside gaming more deeply. This acquisition will undoubtedly be helpful for helping higher budget game studios craft intricate cut scenes but the integration will likely also serve to court more attention from movie studios interested in bringing real-time rendering into their workflows.

Last year, Epic acquired game studio 3Lateral which built more realistic human avatars. That, partnered with this latest acquisition certainly suggests that Epic sees more realism in human characters and avatars as a category worth investing with.

May is traditionally a month of big developer conferences, with Facebook F8, Google I/O and Microsoft Build often happening within the same two-week period. But not this year. After F8 and I/O were already canceled in favor of online events, Microsoft is now unsurprisingly following suit, too, and canceling the in-person element of Build, which was scheduled to run from May 19 to 21, citing concerns over the current coronavirus outbreak.

&The safety of our community is a top priority. In light of the health safety recommendations for Washington State, we will deliver our annual Microsoft Build event for developers as a digital event, in lieu of an in-person event,& the company said in a statement to The Verge. &We look forward to bringing together our ecosystem of developers in this new virtual format to learn, connect and code together. Stay tuned for more details to come.&

The announcement doesn&t exactly come as a surprise. Indeed, it was really only a question of when Microsoft would make the call and the real surprise was how long it took Microsoft to make this call, especially given how hard Washington state has been hit by the coronavirus outbreak. Currently, a number of Washington state counties have banned events with more than 250 people. That ban was set to expire before Build.

Itworth noting that Microsoft hasn&t actually updated the Build homepage yet and you can still buy a ticket. If I were you, I wouldn&t do that, though. You&ll get a refund, but itnot worth the hassle.

Amazon issued guidance Thursday in response to the COVID-19 outbreak recommending that global employees who are able to work from home to do so through the end of March.

&We continue to work closely with public and private medical experts to ensure we are taking the right precautions as the situation continues to evolve,& an Amazon spokesperson said in an email statement. &As a result, we are now recommending that all of our employees globally who are able to work from home do so through the end of March.&

Earlier this week, Amazon said it would provide two weeks of extra paid time off for full and part-time employees who are diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine. This is in addition to unlimited unpaid time off for all hourly employees through the end of March. The company said it will continue to pay all hourly employees, including food service, janitorial and security staff, who support its offices around the world.

Amazon employs some 798,000 employees.While some Amazon office workers will be able to work from home, the vast majority of its workforce have jobs that require them to be on site. The company is reliant on tens of thousands of delivery drivers and employees who work at the more than 100 order fulfillment centers.

Amazonmove follows the call from global health officials to take measure to slow the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by a new virus that is a member of the coronavirus family and a close cousin to the SARS and MERS viruses. COVID-19 has caused governments and companies to cancel tech, business and automotive events around the world, including the NCAA March Madness basketball tournaments, professional sports games in the NBA and NHL, the Geneva International Motor Show, MWC in Barcelona and the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Disneyland and California Adventure will close through the end of the month.

It has also prompted companies to recommend its employees to work from home. Google href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/google-expands-work-from-home-recommendation-to-all-north-american-employees-establishes-covid-19-fund/"> expanded its work-from-home recommendation to include all employees in North America. Box, Lyft, Microsoft and Twitter have also issued memos to employees to recommend or require staff to work from home. In some cases, companies have committed to maintaining wages in spite of reduced hours.