Month: January 2019

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A source speaking to Reuters on Wednesday said that General Motors sold its 200,000th electric vehicle (EV) in Q4 2018, triggering a 15-month phaseout of the Federal Tax Credit that has benefitted GM's EV buyers for years.

GM is expected to announce this information during its Q4 2018 financial call on Thursday. The company indicated previously that it expected to hit the 200,000 mark before the closeout of 2018.

This means that GM's EVs will no longer receive a Federal Tax Credit of $7,500 after April 1. The credit will be cut in half to $3,750 for the next six months, then it will be cut in half again for another six months until it is phased out completely.

NASA YV/YouTube

After the New Horizons mission zoomed by the then-unknown Ultima Thule object in the outer Solar System early on New Year's Day, the spacecraft began returning data to Earth via a deep-space network. Although only about 1 percent of that data is now on the ground, scientists were able to share some top-line findings on Wednesday.

What they have found at a distance of 44 astronomical units (AU) from Earth, or 44 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, is something of a wonderland. The Ultima Thule object, formally named 2014 MU69, is a 33km-long contact binary that somewhat resembles a snowman. Each of the two components is nearly spherical, coming together at a "neck," and this has proved important to confirming scientific ideas for how the planets and moons of the Solar System formed. Overall, the object has a reddish hue, similar to the north pole of Pluto's moon Charon.

Enlarge / The Netflix homepage—iPhone and iPad users will have to go here to sign up for the streaming video service. (credit: Netflix)

Netflix will no longer offer in-app subscription purchases for users of iOS devices like iPhones and iPads, VentureBeat reports. The change cuts off a substantial amount of revenue for Apple at a time when it is working hard to encourage app developers to adopt in-app subscriptions as a model, and when it depends on its services business to tell a growth story to its shareholders.

The change applies to customers who are new to Netflix or who have allowed their subscriptions to lapse. For now, customers already using Apple's platform to pay for Netflix can continue to do so.

Subscriptions have been a major focus for Apple of late. In 2017, the company reportedly invited app developers to a meeting in New York City where it laid out a pitch for using a subscription model for software offered in the iOS App Store. Apple positioned subscriptions as the new model for publishing financially successful apps and games on the platform. When its subscriptions program first launched, Apple took a 30 percent cut, but the portion was reduced to 15 percent, heeding developer feedback that the previous cut was too significant.

Enlarge / Who doesn't love some new Windows? (credit: Peter Bright / Flickr)

About three and a half years after its release, Windows 10 seems to have convincingly passed Windows 7 in usage share. Online stat-tracking service Net Market Share puts Windows 10 at 39.22 percent of usage, versus 36.90 percent for Windows 7.

Web-based stat-tracking services vary in their estimates of who's using what operating system. That's due to different sites being monitored and different methodologies in handling the data. Net Market Share is the one we've seen most often quoted by third parties (including Microsoft and Mozilla), so it is notable as the companies' own preferred measure. Another widely referenced service, StatCounter, reckons that Windows 10 passed Windows 7 a year ago, putting the new operating system at 52.42 percent to its predecessor's 35.65 percent.

That's a lot of people still using Windows 7—an operating system that's due to be end-of-lifed in January 2020. Microsoft says that corporate migrations to Windows 10 are going strong, with more than half of enterprise machines on Windows 10 as of October last year. But the clock is ticking to migrate remaining machines.

Enlarge / Ian Read, chairman and CEO of Pfizer Inc. spoke with President Trump last July about pausing drug price hikes. Pfizer now plans to increase prices of 41 of its drugs later this month. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

More than three dozen drug companies welcomed the new year with sweeping price hikes on hundreds of medicines, according to a new analysis from Rx Savings Solutions, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The drugs that saw list-price increases on January 1 ranged from generics and blood-pressure drugs to brand-name prescriptions such as the dry-eye treatment Restasis. The average price jump blew past inflation at 6.5 percent, with some medicines seeing double-digit increases—bucking many drug companies' vows to keep such periodic hikes under 10 percent.

Despite public and political pressure on pharmaceutical companies to reign in soaring drug prices, Tuesday's wide-ranging increases are no surprise. In December, Reuters reported that 28 drug makers had filed notifications with California agencies that they planned to raise drug prices. (A recently passed law in the Golden State requires drug makers to provide notification if they plan to raise US lists prices by more than 16 percent over a two-year period.)

Enlarge / Google's radar chip detects hand motions, creating a gesture control system. (credit: Google)

Google's radar-based gesture control system for mobile devices, Project Soli, isn't dead yet. The project, which was announced all the way back in 2015, has popped up at the FCC, where it has been approved for use in the 57- to 64-GHz frequency band.

Project Soli's goal is to build a tiny radar system on a chip that can be used to detect hand gestures made above a device. Soli is only at the experimental stage right now, but Google usually pitches Soli as a concept control scheme for smartwatches, speakers, media players, and smartphones. Usually the gestures shown are things like tapping your thumb and index finger together for a virtual button press or rubbing the two fingers together to scroll or turn a dial. The idea makes the most sense for tiny devices like a smartwatch, which don't necessarily have the space for a sizable touch screen and lots of buttons. It could also have benefits for users with limited mobility.

The FCC's decision actually lets Google use Soli at higher than the currently allowed power levels, which was apparently needed to make the chip work. Google originally wanted approval for a power level in line with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute standards but was talked down, oddly enough, by Facebook, which was concerned about interference issues. Facebook is interested in 60GHz broadband through its "Terragraph" project.

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai arrives for his confirmation hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee on July 19, 2017, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

Ajit Pai today celebrated a victory in his ongoing quest to prevent the US government from enforcing net neutrality rules.

The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session. Democrats won a vote to reverse the repeal in the Senate but weren't able to get enough votes in the House of Representatives before time ran out.

"I'm pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the US House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation," Pai said in a statement marking the deadline passage today. Pai claimed that broadband speed improvements and new fiber deployments in 2018 occurred because of his net neutrality repeal—although speeds and fiber deployment also went in the right direction while net neutrality rules were in place.

Enlarge / Slightly Mad Studios likes to promote the VR modes of its Project Cars games. Now its CEO wants to build a living-room gaming box built for high-end VR gaming. (credit: Slightly Mad Studios)

Are you ready for another video game console, complete with promises of high-speed performance for 4K TVs and wireless VR headsets? Are you ready to believe that such a system can be delivered by a game-development studio with zero hardware launches in its history?

Wednesday's announcement of a new console, dubbed the Mad Box, comes courtesy of Ian Bell, CEO and founder of Slightly Mad Studios. And Bell clarified to Ars Technica that he expects the console to launch in "three-plus years" at a "standard plus next-gen price."

The London-based studio is best known for the Project Cars racing-game series on PCs and consoles, which includes its own impressive VR implementation on PCs. But Slightly Mad has no history with hardware production.