Apple has silently begun a new YouTube channel, "Apple TV," apparently laying the groundwork for this fall's Apple TV+ launch.
Wednesday, 24 April 2019
Apple opens dedicated 'Apple TV' YouTube channel, teasing Apple TV+ & iTunes content
Apple has silently begun a new YouTube channel, "Apple TV," apparently laying the groundwork for this fall's Apple TV+ launch.
Black Powerbeats Pro shipping May, other colors due in summer
While Apple's Beats will be launching the Powerbeats Pro in May as promised, only the black model will be available at first, the company says.
Apple rolls out third public beta builds of iOS 12.3 and macOS 10.14.5
One day after providing the latest set of beta builds for developer testing, Apple has made the third public beta counterparts for iOS 12.3 and macOS 10.14.5 available to download for those enrolled in the company's test program.
MacBook, MacBook Pro keyboard repairs 'prioritized' for in-store next-day service
Owners of the MacBook and MacBook Pro may find their keyboard repairs are quicker to complete than usual, with Apple Stores instructed to perform the repair at the in-store Genius Bar, rather than dispatching the notebooks out to an off-site repair shop.
Apple Pay rumored launching in Austria on Wednesday
Apple Pay will reportedly launch in Austria on Wednesday, arriving there well after the U.S. and many European neighbors.
Tim Cook wanted Apple to fight US DOJ in court over encryption
Speaking at Time Magazine's first-ever Time 100 Summit on Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed a variety of topics, most notably saying he wished the company's encryption battle with the U.S. Department of Justice had gone to court.
Mouse support over USB-C could arrive for iPad Pro in iOS 13
Apple could include the ability to use a mouse or trackpad within iOS 13, a report suggests, which beyond accessibility could enable the iPad or iPad Pro to more directly compete with notebooks and other devices that could be used as a complete computer replacement.
Amazon's 1-day storage sale features discounts of up to $420 off, plus $50 off Apple Watch Series 4
Whether you're looking for a portable USB-C drive to travel with your MacBook Pro, or you need a significant amount of space to run alongside your iMac 5K, Amazon's flash storage sale offers discounts of up to 60% off models from SanDisk and Western Digital. Apple Watch Series 4 styles are also eligible for a bonus coupon, delivering the lowest prices available.
SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Destroyed by Explosion During Ground Test
An explosion during a static fire test of the Crew Dragon capsule has led to the total loss of the vehicle.
The post SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Destroyed by Explosion During Ground Test appeared first on ExtremeTech.
Qualcomm's share price expected to continue rising following Apple settlement
Qualcomm's share price still has some space for growth following the surprise settlement with Apple, Morgan Stanley suggests, with the price potentially able to grow by another 15% due to both supplying Apple with modems and being a central figure in the creation of 5G networks.
Samsung clawing back Galaxy Fold from reviewers amid faulty screen complaints
In addition to delaying the launch of the phone, Samsung is now asking reviewers to return their Galaxy Fold samples, acknowledging that they were encountering numerous problems with its foldable OLED screen.
Beyonce's 'Lemonade' album hits Apple Music, moves out of Tidal exclusivity
Long a Tidal exclusive, Beyonce's popular "Lemonade" album is now finally available on Apple Music as well as other streaming services like Spotify.
A new Tesla Model S can now drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a single charge
Tesla has announced that it has extended the range of its Model S vehicle to 370 miles and Model X to 325 miles on a single charge — extending the range of its flagship car to make the trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a single charge.
The extensions beat Tesla’s previous records for mileage per charge using the same 100 kWh battery pack, the company said.
The company also announced a new adaptive suspension system and upgrades to its Ludicrous Mode.
Both models now have the newest drive unit technology, Tesla said. Combining an optimized permanent magnet synchronous reluctance motor, silicon carbide power electronics and improved lubrication, cooling, bearings and gear designs the new cars can achieve better than 93% efficiency, Tesla said in a statement.
By pairing a permanent magnet motor in the front with an induction motor in the rear gives both models better performance times adding up to a 10% improvement in range — offering bidirectional performance benefits as energy flows out of the battery during acceleration and back into the battery through regenerative braking.
The company also announced faster charging on V3 and V2 Superchargers of 200 kW and 145 kW, respectively — which should half the time it takes to recharge the cars.
Improvements to the suspension are also helping to increase performance. The company added fully adaptive damping giving the car a better feel on the highway or in autopilot mode.
Tesla touts that its suspension software was developed in-house and includes algorithms that predict how damping would need to be adjusted based on road conditions, speed, and “vehicle and driver inputs”, according to a statement.
The new models also reduce drag by improving the system’s ability to level — keeping the car lower to the ground. As a thank you to early customers that wish to buy the new Tesla models, the company said it would throw in a Ludicrous Mode upgrade for no additional charge.
We also want to emphasize the critical impact each of our early Tesla owners has had on advancing our mission, so as a thank you, all existing Model S and Model X owners who wish to purchase a new Model S or Model X Performance car will get the Ludicrous Mode upgrade, a $20,000 value, at no additional charge.
The IPO market is heating up again, but it won’t change how fast companies go public
It’s been an exciting couple of months for startup employees and public market shareholders alike, as a growing number of brands that have talked about going public for some time are finally marching out the door and, on the whole, receiving enthusiastic receptions. Lyft, Zoom, PagerDuty, and Pinterest all priced above their marketed ranges in splashy public offerings. Uber is meanwhile veering toward what’s expected to be the biggest IPO in years by seeking what’s rumored to be a $100 billion valuation.
But industry watchers hoping that companies might start going public sooner as they once did may be in for some disappointment. At least, according to industry players with whom we’ve spoken, a broader shift isn’t likely to happen soon – – if ever — again. In fact, absent a dramatic development, it’s far more likely that startups will continue staying private as long as they possibly can.
The numbers largely tell the story. According to the investment bank Scenic Advisement, private investors doused technology and biotech companies with $130.9 billion last year — far outpacing the $50.3 billion raised via IPOs and follow-on offerings. Meanwhile, says Scenic, the total value of private market investment surged 57.8 percent in 2018, the tenth consecutive year in which private share sales were worth more than those in public markets. That trend continues, too, with venture investment flows far outpacing public-market fundraising so far in 2019.
Consider that Lyft raised $4.91 billion in the private market versus the roughly $2.34 billion it picked up in its recent IPO. Dropbox, which went public last year, raised $756 million in its IPO, versus the $1.7 billion it raised privately. Uber has raised almost $20 billion privately and is expected to raise around $10 billion in its upcoming offering. (There have also been companies that buck this trend. Zoom raised $161 million privately and raised $750 million when it went public last week. DocuSign, which went public last year, also raised more in its IPO — $630 million — than the $550 million investors had funneled into the company when it was still privately held.)
Those ratios might not change much going forward, despite the current IPO hoopla. “In the early part of this decade, there was relative parity between how much money was raised in venture and how much was raised through IPOs,” says Shriram Bhashyam, a founder and advisor at the secondary trading platform EquityZen. “But private funding has been outpacing IPO proceeds for a few years, and that gap is continuing to grow.”
Even if not all privately held startups are eventual public market candidates, it “gives you an idea directionally” of how the public and private markets are continuing to shift, he suggests.
The public market exchanges readily acknowledge the change. We talked last week with Jeff Thomas, who oversees Nasdaq’s operations for the Western U.S. and who previously spent several years as a president with Nasdaq Private Market, which the exchange formed in 2013 to offer companies alternative liquidity solutions while remaining private.
Thomas talked at length about companies no longer needing to go public in order to access capital, noting there’s a “ton of capital” flooding into private companies and predicting much more is coming. (Note: the $130 billion invested in startups last year broke the previous record of $105 billion plugged into startups in 2000.)
The appeal of staying private is well-known and well-documented. Aside from the easy money available, founders can avoid the scrutiny of research analysts and regulators, not to mention sometimes short-sighted public market shareholders who aren’t afraid to take action when they feel cheated. Lyft is already being sued by shareholders who are angry the company’s shares are down roughly 25 percent from their opening day peak. As Bloomberg recently reported, Snap was sued within 10 weeks of going public; Blue Apron was sued within seven weeks of its IPO.
Still, the public markets aren’t going anywhere, also for well-understood reasons. Even as they shrink compared with the public market, companies that can go public will continue to do so because it’s easier for them to acquire other companies once their shares are converted to common shares, because companies will lose employees if they don’t go public (most private companies limit how much equity employees can sell), and because there’s still a certain cache associated with being a publicly traded company. The last is especially important when it comes to charming other companies into partnerships. “Being a publicly traded company and being able to provide visibility into your balance sheet is very helpful in customer development,” says Thomas.
Taking a company public is also one way to tackle income inequality, which has worsened as more private companies investors — already the wealthiest investors in the world — have enjoyed near exclusive access to companies during some of their fastest growing years.
It may not be top of mind for chief executives, but it’s an important point that will hopefully resonate more as these trend lines, and their consequences, grow clearer. “There are now so few people who can participate in the private market on a relative basis,” says Thomas. “America stands for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, including having enough money to pay for college and retirement.” The ongoing shift toward staying private longer is “making it much harder for individuals to pursue that dream,” he adds.
It’s why the Securities and Exchange Commission under current chair Jay Clayton wants to make it easier for individuals like mom-and-pop investors to invest in private companies.
Whether Clayton gets his way remains an open question. If there’s any consolation in the meantime, it may be that mutual fund investors, including T. Rowe Price and Fidelity, have continued pouring more of their own assets into startups, recognizing that if they want alpha, the private market is where they’re going to find it. Private shares are still a small fraction of their assets, but for everyday investors who want access to more of the buzziest startups as they are coming up, it may have to suffice for now.
‘Avengers: Endgame’ is a very silly movie, but it ends in exactly the right way
With just a few days until the release of “Avengers: Endgame,” Marvel fans everywhere are probably wondering A) Who dies?? and B) Will this actually resolve the cliffhanger ending of “Infinity War” in a satisfying way?
So, just to get it out of the way: A) I’m not telling, and B) Kind of? Mostly? It depends?
Certainly, if you’re like me and found yourself fatigued by the constant, overcrowded battles of “Infinity War,” the beginning of “Endgame” will come as an enormous relief. There’s a brief flicker of action, then we get plenty of time to deal with the fallout from “Infinity War.” (And if you don’t already know how that movie ends, why are you reading this review?)
We see that half the population of Earth, and the universe, really died after Thanos’ magical finger snap, leaving the original Avengers team and a handful of other heroes to try to rebuild and move on. There’s plenty about the aftermath that simply gets hand-waved away with a few shots of empty streets and grieving extras — but we get to spend time with characters like Iron Man, Captain America and the Hulk, to see how they’ve responded and changed in the wake of universal catastrophe.
Marvel Studios’ AVENGERS: ENDGAME ©Marvel Studios 2019
Of course, they’re not sitting around moping for the entire three-hour (!) runtime. Eventually, a plan is hatched to undo what Thanos has done. And while I’m going to stay as vague as possible about that plan, I think it’s safe to say that the results are textbook fan service.
After all, as its name makes clear, “Endgame” is meant to serve as the culmination of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and as a final act for some of its most famous heroes. The film’s middle stretch feels very much like a farewell tour, working overtime to remind viewers of everything they like about these characters and their stories.
Diehard Marvel fans, I suspect, will eat it up. Casual viewers may not be quite as satisfied.
Personally, I was delighted when I realized what the filmmakers were going to do. But as these sequences went on, and on, and on, my enthusiasm waned. By the time the grand finale began, virtually all the goodwill built up during the film’s opening had evaporated.
So by the simple metric of whether “Endgame” finds a way to reverse the ending of “Infinity War” in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or cynical, I’m afraid I’d say it’s a failure. And I’m not sure I can claim that the ending is any less cynical or sentimental.
For this viewer, however, that ending absolutely works — so effectively that it not only salvages the movie, not only helps me forgive the draggy bits, but even makes me think of “Infinity War” more warmly.
As the MCU has gone on, it’s become increasingly difficult to regard the whole enterprise without skepticism — to see it as something other than an excuse to create one guaranteed blockbuster after another, each one leading inexorably to the next. And although some of those blockbusters are very good indeed, Marvel’s weakest moments feel like obvious concessions to this strategy, with stories that either grind to a halt introducing new characters and subplots, or get dragged out needlessly in sequel after sequel.
But in the closing minutes of “Endgame,” I forgot all that. As our heroes arrived for a final, desperate battle, it felt like the triumphant climax that every single one of these films has been building up to.
And when the end came, it wasn’t an excuse to conveniently shuffle certain actors offstage. Instead, Marvel found a natural endpoint for the characters’ stories. And in one case — the film’s final shot — it didn’t just feel natural. It felt perfect.
There will be more Marvel movies. The Avengers will, inevitably, return — at least in some form. But I was thrilled and moved with the way some of them said goodbye.
Jack Dorsey just met with Trump to talk about the health of Twitter’s public discourse
Twitter’s co-founder and CEO historically doesn’t have the most discerning tastes when it comes to who he decides to engage with. Fresh off the podcast circuit, today a thoroughly beardy Jack Dorsey sat down with President Trump for his most high-profile tête-à-tête yet.
Unlike his recent amble onto the Joe Rogan show, Dorsey’s 30-minute meeting with Trump happened behind closed doors. Motherboard reported the meeting just before Trump tweeted about it.
Unless either of the men decides to share more about what they discussed we won’t know how things went down exactly, though it’s probably easy enough to guess. According to the Motherboard report, the initial internal Twitter email named “the health of the public conversation on Twitter” as the topic of the day.
Given that, we’d guess that Trump probably took the chance to bring up recent unfounded gripes about conservative censorship on the platform while Dorsey likely offered reassurances, active listening and other assorted gestures of noncommittal mildness.
According to the internal memo, Dorsey preemptively defended his decision to accept an invite from Trump. “Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn’t take this meeting at all,” Dorsey wrote in an email. “In the end, I believe it’s important to meet heads of state in order to listen, share our principles and our ideas.”
Update: Dorsey tweeted at Trump thanking him for the conversation. “Twitter is here to serve the entire public conversation, and we intend to make it healthier and more civil,” Dorsey wrote. “Thanks for the discussion about that.” The Washington Post reports Trump complained that the company unjustly “limited or removed some of his followers” in his session with the Twitter CEO. In fact, Trump was just tweeting about that earlier in the day.
Postmates has launched in 1,000 new cities since December
Postmates is expanding like crazy ahead of an initial public offering expected later this year. The food delivery business has launched in 1,000 new cities since December, the company announced today.
San Francisco-based Postmates now operates its on-demand delivery platform, powered by a network of local gig economy workers, in 3,500 cities across all 50 states. Postmates does not yet operate in any international markets aside from Mexico City.
“We want to enable anyone to have anything delivered on demand and this latest expansion allows us to deliver on that promise across all 50 states in the US,” Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann said in a statement.
The company says it now reaches 70 percent of U.S. households and delivers food from some 500,000 restaurants, helping it to compete with food-delivery powerhouses Uber Eats and DoorDash. Additionally, Postmates recently launched Postmates Party, a new feature that lets customers within the same neighborhood pool their orders.
Postmates is poised to follow Uber into the public markets. The company — which has raised more than $670 million in venture capital funding, including a $100 million pre-IPO financing in January that valued the business at $1.85 billion — filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO in February.
The company completes 5 million deliveries per month and was reportedly expected to record $400 million in revenue in 2018 on food sales of $1.2 billion. Uber Eats, for its part, was expected to begin reaching 70 percent of the U.S. households by the end of 2018 and reportedly has plans in the works to use drones to deliver food by 2021.
DoorDash, meanwhile, is a rocketship. The food delivery company is active in 3,300 cities and claims to be growing 325 percent year-over-year. The company recently closed a $400 million Series F financing at a $7.1 billion valuation. It’s likely to go public in the next year, too.
Manufacturing giant Aebi Schmidt hit by ransomware
Aebi Schmidt, a European manufacturing giant with operations in the U.S., has been hit by a ransomware attack, TechCrunch has learned.
The Switzerland-based maker of airport maintenance and road cleaning vehicles had operations disrupted Tuesday following the malware infection, according to a source with knowledge of the incident.
Systems went down across the company’s international network, including its U.S. subsidiaries, but much of the damage was in the company’s European base. A number of systems connected to the Aebi Schmidt network across the world were left paralyzed. The source said systems necessary for manufacturing operations were inaccessible following the attack. The company’s email is also said to be affected.
It isn’t immediately known what kind of ransomware knocked the company’s systems offline.
The multinational manufacturing giant recently expanded its U.S. presence with the acquisition of M-B Companies, a maker of snow removal and cleaning machines, following earlier acquisitions of winter maintenance equipment maker Meyer Products and Swenson Products.
After several efforts to reach the company by email, phone or unsolicited LinkedIn messages, spokesperson Thomas Schiess confirmed a systems outage, specifically “e-mail system troubles,” in a Facebook message. “I can confirm that the availability of other systems was or may still be limited, our specialists are still working on resolving the issue, the cause is not yet clear,” he said, but would not comment further.
Aebi Schmidt is the latest company downed by ransomware in recent weeks.
Aluminum manufacturing giant Norsk Hydro was forced offline briefly following a ransomware attack in March. The company quickly recovered after it put in place its backup recovery process. It was a better response than drinks company Arizona Beverages, which was hit by ransomware a month later, causing its systems to shutter for a week — despite warnings from the FBI weeks earlier that the company was infected with malware lying dormant.
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