Month: January 2019

Enlarge / iPhones are seen at an Apple Store in Tianjin, China. (credit: Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Apple today shared its fiscal first-quarter revenue with shareholders. As investors feared and as previously warned, Apple posted revenue of $84.3 billion for the quarter ending in December, missing revenue expectations in the quarter by around $4 billion.

CEO Tim Cook primarily credited macroeconomic conditions in China and their impact on iPhone sales in that region for the failure to meet expectations. That said, the company reported that every part of its business besides the iPhone was up year over year, as was overall revenue in the United States and Europe. The quarter was its second best ever in terms of revenue.

Investors were waiting for the report with bated breath after the company announced earlier this year that it expected to miss its revenue target for the quarter. Apple stock has taken a considerable tumble in recent months thanks to fears about smartphone market saturation, trade tensions between the United States and China, and other unfavorable market conditions in China.

Enlarge / A Gulfstream G650ER executive jet sits on display on the second day of the 14th Dubai Air Show. Musk, too, owns a Gulfstream G650ER. (credit: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Flight data obtained by The Washington Post shows that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has a private jet that logged about 150,000 miles in 2018. While many billionaires have private jets, Musk's jet stands out in the number of trips it made and miles it logged, the Post reports.

Perhaps most egregious, the plane logged a number of 20-mile trips, repositioning from the south side of Los Angeles to the north side. "Tesla said Musk never used the plane to fly between different spots in Los Angeles," the Post reports. Instead, the jet would make the 20-mile repositioning flights to meet the CEO at a closer airport.

Flying is an extremely carbon-intensive activity, made worse when only a few people are transported rather than many are on a commercial jet. According to the Post, the 150,000 miles that Musk's jet flew represents roughly 250 flights. Although it's not always clear that Musk was aboard every flight, the CEO's private jet made 100 more flights than the private jet of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (and owner of The Washington Post).

Enlarge / Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) and journalist Jay Singletary (Chris Pine) team up to track down Fauna's birth mother. (credit: TNT)

A burnt-out journalist and an innocent teenage girl find themselves drawn into a web of murderous intrigue in I Am the Night, a moody, atmospheric miniseries from TNT that owes much of its tone to classic LA noir—and part of its plot, namely, to the infamous Black Dahlia murder. But anyone hoping for another lurid rehashing of that still-unsolved crime might be disappointed. I Am the Night is as much about race, personal identity, and facing down one's demons.

(Mild spoilers for pilot episode below.)

Chris Pine (Wonder Woman, Outlaw King) shines here as Jay Singletary, a former Marine with PTSD who now scrapes out a dissolute living as a tabloid paparazzo. He used to be a legit journalist for the Los Angeles Times before his coverage of a 1949 indecency trial ended his career. A prominent real-life physician named George Hodel (Jefferson Mays, The Americans) was accused of molesting his teenaged daughter and suspected of having committed the Black Dahlia murder. Thanks to Hodel's powerful, well-connected friends, he was acquitted in the former and never charged with the latter.

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Health insurance giant Aetna has teamed up with Apple to create a health-tracking app for Apple Watch that will have access to Aetna members’ medical data and offer monetary rewards for meeting personalized wellness goals.

The idea is to go beyond basic activity monitors and generic step goals, the two companies said in a debut event today, January 29, in Boston. Instead, the app, called Attain, will create tailored goals—drawing from Aetna members’ own insurance and medical information to do so—and provide nudges and incentives that aim to boost long-term health.

For any Aetna members wary of sharing such health tracking data with their insurer and Apple, the two companies emphasized that the app was packed with security features (such as continuous authentication) and privacy features (such as opt-in data sharing choices). Perhaps most importantly, Aetna promised that the “[i]nformation from this program will not be used for underwriting, premium or coverage decisions.”