Month: January 2018

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple announced big economic plans yesterday, but CEO Tim Cook also touched upon what the company will do in the future to address the grievances brought by users about its recent iPhone performance-slowing controversy. In an interview with ABC News, Cook said that new software updates will allow users with older iPhones to turn off the power management feature that intentionally slows down device performance.

"We will tell someone we're reducing your performance by some amount in order to not have an unexpected restart," Cook said. "And if you don't want it, you can turn it off."

Cook's disclaimer is that Apple doesn't recommend turning off this feature, as the company initially came out with it to stop unexpected shut-downs. At the end of 2017, Apple admitted to intentionally slowing down iPhone performance to prevent shut-downs related to the device's deteriorating battery health. Users had suspected Apple's practice for quite some time, and despite Apple's reasoning, many users were furious and a number of class-action lawsuits have been filed against the company.

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Google currently has two OSes on the market: Android and Chrome OS. The company is never one to leave a successful product alone in the marketplace, though, so it's also developing a third operating system called "Fuchsia." When we last checked in on the experimental OS in May 2017, calling it an "OS" was a bit of a stretch. We only got the system UI up and running on top of Android, where it then functioned like an app. The UI offered a neat multi-window system, but mostly it was just a bunch of placeholder graphics. Nothing worked.

It has been hard to check in on Fuchsia since. The Fuchsia system UI, which was written with a cross-platform SDK called "Flutter," quickly shut down the Android (and iOS) compatible builds. Fuchsia has a Vulkan-based graphics stack, and no emulator supports the new-ish graphics API. The only way to get Fuchsia up and running again was with actual hardware, and the only supported devices were Intel NUC PCs from 2015 and the Acer Switch Alpha 12 laptop.

Enlarge / The Atlas V rocket is powered by a single RD-180 rocket engine. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Ever since the Crimean crisis in 2014—precipitated by Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian-held peninsula—Congress has increased pressure on the US aerospace industry to end its use of Russian-made rocket engines. In particular, legislators want United Launch Alliance to stop using the RD-180 engine in its Atlas V launch vehicle. This booster, with a 100 percent mission success rate, launches many of America's national security payloads.

As United Launch Alliance plans to transition to US-made engines early next decade, and with other US rockets already flying or soon coming online, the Russian RD-180 manufacturers are looking to other markets. In doing so, they've found willing buyers in China, although this has come with some concerns.

Even though the rocket engine technology behind the RD-180 is 40 years old, it remains one of the highest performing engines in the world, with a near-perfect service record. With 860,000 pounds of thrust (about 3.8MN), the RD-180 also happens to be three times more powerful than any Chinese rocket engine.