Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Tesla's new supercharger in Arlington, Texas. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla's Model 3 production bottleneck is "now understood," according to to Panasonic's CEO Kazuhiro Tsuga. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Tsuga, whose company jointly operates a Gigafactory in Sparks, Nev. with Tesla, told an earnings call that battery production output "could soon be increased." His comments, which come the day before partner Tesla reports its own 2017 Q3 earnings, provided yet another small insight into the "production hell" that has beset the electric vehicle manufacturer as it tries to enter the world of mass production.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal claimed that the 260-odd Model 3s delivered up to that point had "major portions" built by hand, a charge that Tesla strenuously denied. Although WSJ and others have been pointing to problems with the the "body in white" of the Model 3—the mix of aluminum and steel that sits atop the skateboard chassis which will eventually be built by what Elon Musk has previously called an "alien dreadnaught"—from the sounds of things battery pack production hasn't been quite that simple either.

"This process (for battery packs) will be soon automated, and then the number of vehicles to be produced will rise sharply," Tsuga told reporters. That indicates that until now, the battery pack production hasn't been automated at the Gigafactory. Obviously, such a process needs to be for Tesla to realize its goal of producing 20,000 Model 3s a month.

Enlarge / Surface Pro with a Cobalt Blue Type Cover.

Microsoft already let slip most of the details of the Surface Pro with LTE back in September at its Ignite conference, but today at an event in London, Panos Panay, vice president of Microsoft Devices, formally launched the device and filled in a few of the remaining details.

The Surface Pro with LTE Advanced takes two configurations of the 2017 Surface Pro—both Core i5, one with 4GB RAM and 128GB storage, the other with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage—and adds to them a Category 9 LTE Advanced modem. Given a suitable phone network to connect to, this can offer up to 450Mbps download speed. The modem supports 20 different radio bands and as such should support LTE connectivity in most countries, provided that a suitable SIM is installed. Microsoft insists that LTE battery life will be substantially identical to that when using Wi-Fi, so as long as you're only using one kind of connectivity at a time.

The LTE versions are being squarely positioned at business customers and what Microsoft calls a "new culture of work"; in particular, the company estimates that by 2020, some half of all workers will be mobile, to a greater or lesser degree, working not just in an office but at home, in airports, cafés, customer sites, or beyond. Even today, Wi-Fi connectivity is neither as ubiquitous nor as reliable as one might like (and security concerns about Wi-Fi in places like cafés and hotels will always be with us), and integrated LTE bridges that gap.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich)

Waymo has long had a sizeable lead in self-driving technology, and recent reports indicate that Larry Page, CEO of Waymo parent company Alphabet, is determined not to let it slip away. According to The Information's Amir Efrati, Waymo CEO John Krafcik is under pressure to launch a commercial service in the Phoenix metro area as soon as this fall.

But at a Monday event with reporters at Waymo's Castle testing grounds in California's Central Valley, Krafcik was non-committal about the company's launch plans. In fact, he cast doubt on whether a driverless taxi service would even be Waymo's first product, as almost everyone has assumed it would be.

"We'll have to see," Krafcik said, noting that the company was also working on self-driving truck technology. "We're also considering working directly with cities."

Enlarge / The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. (credit: Samuel Axon)

The latest news in the Apple-Qualcomm saga suggests that Apple may be trying to leave the chipmaker behind as soon as next year. A report by The Wall Street Journal states that Apple is designing iPhones and iPads that do not use Qualcomm components. Instead, the tech giant may source modem chips from Intel or MediaTek.

Apple began stepping away from Qualcomm chips with the introduction of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, both of which us a combination of Qualcomm and Intel chips. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which came out in September, also use a combination of Qualcomm and Intel chips.

According to the report, the decision came after Qualcomm withheld software needed by Apple to test the chips in its device prototypes. This reportedly happened after Apple filed a federal lawsuit against Qualcomm in January for charging billions in patent royalty fees "for technologies they have nothing to do with."

Enlarge / Equity investment in the space sector since the dawn of the "Entrepreneurial" space age. (credit: Space Angels)

In July 2009, SpaceX launched its first commercial payload—a 50kg Earth observation satellite for Malaysia—which flew into space aboard a privately developed rocket. According to a new space investment report that will be published Tuesday by the Space Angels, an angel fund and a venture capital fund focused on space, that marked a key inflection point between the "governmental" space age and the "entrepreneurial" space age.

"With that launch, SpaceX significantly lowered the barriers to entry in the space industry," the fund's chief executive, Chad Anderson, writes in the new report. "By vertically integrating, the company was able to drastically reduce the cost to get to orbit. But what deserves at least as much credit is their decision to publish their pricing, which fundamentally changed the way we do business in space. This transparency enabled would-be space entrepreneurs to develop a business plan and raise equity financing based on those cost assumptions."

The Space Angels organization prepares quarterly investment reports, but until this week has not published them for public consumption. (Ars will provide a link to the report when it goes online). The report breaks down equity investment in the space sector by year, since 2009, in angel, venture capital, corporate and other forms of non-governmental investment.