☕ Good morning and hooray for Friday. Radical honesty from Hyundai caught me by surprise this week. What a mistake. Read on for more!
Remember November 24, 2020, when Elon Musk passed Bill Gates to become the world’s second-richest person, but was still about $70-80 billion or so behind Jeff Bezos?
Thanks almost entirely due to Tesla stock continuing an astonishing run, Elon Musk is now the world’s richest person, by 10 billion or so dollars too, adding $25B just in 2021.
And as Ars Technica details, Musk will earn even more Tesla stock if Tesla hits ambitious revenue and profit targets.
Here’s what’s happened in the Apple car world yesterday:
First, incredibly, Hyundai Motor says it’s in early talks with Apple to develop an electric self-driving car, and that Apple is talking with other carmakers too (CNBC):
This bizarre honesty from Hyundai:
Following that up was some more in-depth reporting from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg on where the Apple car project is, really. Which is to say, still a long way off, but actually on the table as a real project with experienced hands-on board; even if the car is nowhere near the production stage, and may just be a solution for autonomous tech,
Quotes:
Finally, in EV news: Mercedes-Benz has unveiled its absolutely massive 56-inch ‘Hyperscreen’ for its EQS electric car (The Verge), which is coming out this year.
📺 Sony’s new Bravia XR TVs for 2021 bring Google TV UI and HDMI 2.1 across the board, plus a new Bravia Core streaming service for some Sony Pictures movies (Android Authority).
💻 Hands on with the new Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2, which drops back from the $999 4K premium Chromebook to a more regular approach that delivers on build and basics for $550 (Android Authority).
💻 Acer’s new Chromebook Spin 514 is powered by AMD mobile CPUs and GPUs (Android Authority).
🔊 JBL announces the Charge 5 speaker and a load of new over-ear headphones to true wireless earbuds, plus soundbar with Dolby Atmos and more (Android Authority).
🔥 Acer’s newest Nitro monitor supports HDMI 2.1 for 4K, 120 fps console gaming (Engadget).
🛬 Boeing criminally charged for lying about 737 Max crashes, fined $2.5 billion, with the fine split between injured parties. Mind you: “the Justice Department will dismiss the charge against Boeing after three years if the company cooperates with the government” (Bloomberg).
😬 WhatsApp’s new privacy policy: Let us share your data with Facebook or else, with no opt-out, for now. This is leading to people exploring Signal, Telegram, and Matrix, an open-source decentralized project (Engadget).
💳 Mobile-first bank Simple is shutting down (Engadget).
💸 A Trump tax means you’ll pay 25% more for Nvidia and AMD’s impossible-to-find graphics cards (The Verge).
🗄 The race to preserve and archive the DC Mob’s digital content and traces (Wired).
🤔 “Do I have a moral obligation to be on TikTok? Shouldn’t I stay current, the better to relate to—and thus support—the inheritors of the earth?” (Wired).
So, the Arctic polar vortex has just been disrupted. Just what exactly that means is something well explored over on Mashable, explaining that yes, it’s something that happens every other year or so, but it didn’t happen last year.
Thanks,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.