Farhad’s Week in Tech: HomePod Whiffs, but Elon Musk Does Not<br />Travis Kalanick took the stand, drank a whole lot of water, offered his thoughts on greed<br />and Google, and introduced the world to the crazy lexicon of tech bros: “unpumped,” “angsty” and, most mysteriously of all, “laser is the sauce.”<br />These are the highlights from Waymo’s big trade-secrets lawsuit against Uber, which,<br />after months of legal maneuvering, finally hit a San Francisco courtroom this week.<br />Every reviewer — among them Nilay Patel at The Verge, Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal and my New York Times colleague Brian X. Chen — found<br />that HomePod beat Echo, Google Home and a comparable Sonos device in audio quality.<br />At the heart of the case is one question: Did Uber steal trade secrets from Waymo, Google’s self-driving<br />car spin-off, when it purchased Otto, a self-driving company founded by former employees of Waymo?<br />Where Amazon’s and Google’s devices can answer a variety of questions<br />and perform lots of different tasks (like order up an Uber or Lyft), HomePod’s brain, Siri, needs evolution.<br />Kalanick conceded that during a “jam sesh” with Anthony Levandowski, the former Waymo engineer alleged<br />to have stolen its secrets, he discussed the key technology at issue in the case, laser sensors.
