Daily Crunch: Apple releases macOS Big Sur

The latest Mac operating system arrives, Amazon faces a lawsuit over PPE and Disney+ turns one. This is your Daily Crunch for November 12, 2020.

The big story: Apple releases macOS Big Sur

This update, which was first announced five months ago at WWDC, includes a number of design changes that continue to blur the line between macOS and iOS.

One of the big additions is the Control Center, an iOS/iPadOS feature that presents a translucent pane down the right side of the screen. Meanwhile, Safari added features like built-in translation. And app icons and sounds have been updated throughout.

Brian Heater has been using the beta since June, and he concluded that Big Sur “boasts some key upgrades to apps and the system at large, but more importantly from Apple’s perspective, it lays the groundwork for the first round of Arm-powered Macs and continues its march toward a uniformity between the company’s two primary operating systems.”

The tech giants

Facebook’s Snapchat-like ‘Vanish Mode’ feature arrives on Messenger and Instagram — The feature, meant for more casual conversations, allows users to set chats to automatically delete after the message is seen and the chat is closed.

Amazon faces lawsuit alleging failure to provide PPE to workers during pandemic — The class action suit alleges Amazon failed to properly protect its warehouse workers and violated elements of New York City’s human rights law.

Apple HomePod Mini review: Remarkably big sound — A smart speaker for the masses.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Menlo Security announces $100M Series E on $800M valuation — CEO and co-founder Amir Ben-Efraim told us the startup remains focused on web and email as major attack vectors.

Livestorm raises $30M for its browser-based meeting and webinar platform — It’s purely browser based, without requiring presenters or attendees to install any software.

Nana nabs $6M for an online academy and marketplace dedicated to appliance repair — Nana runs a free academy to teach people how to fix appliances, then gives them the option to become a part of its repair marketplace.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Are subscription services the future of fintech? — As subscriptions become an increasingly alluring business model, fintechs will have to consider whether this strategy is worth the risk.

Conflicts in California’s trade secret laws on customer lists create uncertainty — Read this before you jump ship or hire a salesperson who already has.

As public investors reprice edtech bets, what’s ahead for the hot startup sector? — Selling edtech on the vaccine news (as investors did) was a bet that growth in the sector would be constrained by a return to normalcy.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Disney+ has more than 73M subscribers — The streaming service launched one year ago today.

L’Oréal rolls out a line of ‘virtual makeup’ — This builds on L’Oréal’s 2018 acquisition of an augmented reality filter company called Modiface.

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