Month: January 2018

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Audio device maker Sonos this week announced a deal in which it will offer two of its Sonos One smart speakers for $349. The offer, a $49 discount, went live at various retailers on Friday. It will remain in effect for "a limited time," according to the company.

The deal appears designed to fend off any traction that Apple might gain with its much-anticipated HomePod speaker, which launched on Friday for the same $349 price tag. Apple has advertised the HomePod as a small Internet-connected home speaker focused on audio quality, a market category where Sonos has been strong in recent years. Like the Sonos One, Google Home, and Amazon Echo, the HomePod will also connect to a voice assistant—in this case, Siri—to answer questions, send messages, and play music, among other tasks.

That said, the HomePod is launching with a few significant caveats: It won't be able to pair with a second HomePod and stream multi-room audio, its voice commands do not support any music streaming service besides Apple Music, and Siri is generally seen as inferior to Alexa and Google Assistant for this class of device. It's also relatively expensive.

Enlarge (credit: David Butow | Getty Images)

"Tesla employees say to expect more Model 3 delays," read a headline from CNBC yesterday. CNBC's Lora Kolodny reported that despite Tesla's ambitions to run a highly automated manufacturing process, Tesla has been being forced to perform some battery-assembly steps in its Nevada Gigafactory by hand, borrowing scores of employees from its battery partner, Panasonic, to do it.

It sounds like a big headache for the Palo Alto carmaker until you notice one key detail: the article is talking about the state of Tesla's manufacturing operation "as recently as mid-December."

In December, Tesla and Panasonic workers were manually assembling bandoliers, rows of lithium-ion cells glued on either side of a cooling tube. It's a tricky task to complete by hand, so the manual assembly led to a lot of errors and waste.

Enlarge (credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg)

Most Walmart stores have modest book sections, but now the company plans to expand that with digital books. Walmart announced that it's teamed up with Japan's Rakuten to sell e-books, audiobooks, and Rakuten's Kobo e-readers later this year.

"We have long been a destination for entertainment including digital content—whether movies through VUDU or the digital game cards we sell in our stores," Walmart's statement said. "E-books and audiobooks are a great addition to our assortment. Working with Rakuten Kobo enables us to quickly and efficiently launch a full e-book and audiobook catalog on Walmart.com to provide our customers with additional choices alongside our assortment of physical books."

Kobo e-readers and compatible e-books are mostly popular outside the US in countries including Canada, the UK, France, Italy, and Australia. Walmart will be Kobo's "exclusive" US partner, meaning it will be the biggest retailer to sell Kobo e-readers in the country, along with access to its library of over six million e-books.

Video shot by Joshua Ballinger, edited and produced by Jing Niu and David Minick. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Christmas is over, the new year has started, and we're all back at work at the Ars Orbiting HQ. This means that it's time to pick back up with part four of "The Greatest Leap," our retrospective on the Apollo program. The first three parts—which you can find here, here, and here—took us from the start of the program through the triumph of the first lunar landing in 1969; the next part focuses on the people who made things happen.

Though our interviewees came from all different parts of the program—from flight operations to engineering to planning to management to actually flying missions—they all had a similar view of Apollo: it was a singular, supernal experience that affected them profoundly. Although many suffered through personal hardships and sacrifices—even the most stable of marriages were tested by seemingly unending years of overtime and weekend work—no one we spoke to regretted their time on Apollo or saw it as anything other than a profoundly worthwhile effort. In many ways, working on the program was a dream job—the ultimate engineering challenge, with an almost laughably audacious goal, balanced by effectively unlimited funding. It's like that old adage when you have "good," "fast," and "cheap," and you can pick two—for Apollo, "good" and "fast" were the priorities, and "cheap" wasn't even in the picture.