Month: January 2020

Enlarge / The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, which will now gain consumers $40 less in trade-in value than before. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has proudly touted its trade-in and recycling programs, mentioning them prominently at major events, during investor calls, and on its website. But in changes that quietly went into effect this week, the company reduced the trade-in value for many of its products, meaning consumers will get less money for their old iPhones and other devices than they did previously.

MacRumors reported the news based on looking at values estimated on Apple's online store before and after the change, and the site listed the tracked changes. Trading in an iPhone XS Max was previously estimated to fetch the consumer $600 toward an upgrade, but that number is now $500. The iPhone 8 estimate has gone down from $220 to $180, an iPad Air from $100 to $70, and an Apple Watch series 4 went from $110 to $100.

It's interesting to note, however, that Mac trade-in values were barely affected, if they changed at all. And all Apple Watch models except the newest series 4 model also remained the same. It's mainly the iPhone and iPad product lines that have been impacted.

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  Xbox Series X. It's tall. And it has a modified controller compared to the Xbox One pad. [credit: Xbox ]

Back in the middle of 2016, Microsoft was just revealing the first details of Xbox One Scorpio (which became the Xbox One X), and Sony was just confirming the rumored existence of the PlayStation 4 Neo (which became the PS4 Pro). At the time, we had a simple question for the console industry's near future:

In 2021, will developers still be expected to make games fully compatible with the original Xbox One and PS4 (console hardware that will be pushing eight years old at that point)? Or will developers be allowed to focus on the 'legacy' Neo/Scorpio hardware and (presumably) whatever new top-end upgrade will replace them?

Now that such a heralded console future is approaching the console present (a year ahead of our original predictions), we at least have a temporary answer as far as Microsoft is concerned. In a recent interview with trade magazine MCV, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty revealed that there are no plans to sequester the first year or two of games for the upcoming Xbox Series X away from compatibility with the original Xbox One.

"As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, sort of like PC, will play up and down that family of devices," Booty explains. "We want to make sure that if someone invests in Xbox between now and [Series X] that they feel that they made a good investment and that we’re committed to them with content."

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump arrives for a "Keep America Great" campaign rally at Huntington Center in Toledo, Ohio, on January 9, 2020. (credit: Getty | Saul Loeb)

The CEO of the American Cancer Society has refuted President Trump’s claim that his administration had a hand in lowering the country’s cancer mortality rate, which has been steadily declining since 1991—26 years prior to Trump taking office.

Trump’s bold claim came after the American Cancer Society published its latest data on US cancer mortality rates in an annual report. The data, published Wednesday, January 8, indicated that the overall cancer mortality rate continued its downward slide through 2017, with a 2.2 percent drop between 2016 and 2017. That’s the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality rate ever recorded. And overall, mortality rates between 1991 and 2017 have declined by 29 percent, sparing an estimated 2.9 million people from cancer deaths in that time frame.

The next day, January 9, Trump posted a tweet appearing to take credit for the decline, writing, “U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.”

Enlarge / Indian prime minister Narendra Modi addresses the United Nations General Assembly in 2019. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The Indian region of Kashmir has had most Internet service blacked out since August. The government of Narendra Modi says the online blackout is a necessary security measure in the face of growing unrest in the region triggered by a change in Kashmir's status under the Indian constitution. (Kashmir's status within India has been a topic of controversy for decades.)

"The government says it was necessary to block the Internet to stop agitators orchestrating mass, potentially violent, protests against its decision to revoke Kashmir’s special status," Reuters reports.

But on Friday, India's highest court rejected the government's rationale, arguing that the blackout violated Indian telecommunications laws.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Henrik5000)

The Federal Communications Commission plans to grant a request from AT&T and other ISPs to make more rural-broadband funding available for slower-speed services with lower data caps.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai initially proposed distributing $20.4 billion in rural-broadband funding to ISPs offering three levels of service: an entry-level tier of 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds, with a data cap of at least 150GB a month; a mid-range level of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up, with a data cap of at least 2TB per month; and a "gigabit performance" tier of 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up, with a data cap of at least 2TB.

But AT&T, Frontier, Windstream, and their industry lobby group urged the FCC to either lower the standards of the mid-range tier or add another tier that would be below the mid-range one. The FCC is complying, with an updated plan that it released yesterday and scheduled for a January 30 vote.

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  LG's latest smartphone, the LG V50. It looks boring here, but... [credit: LG ]

LG is still clinging to its dying smartphone business. The company's new CEO, Kwon Bong-seok, (who was appointed just last month!) promised a return to profitability for LG's mobile division by 2021.

"LG Electronics' mobile business is going to be profitable by 2021," Kwon told The Korea Times. "I can say we can make that happen as LG Electronics will expand our mobile lineup and steadily release new ones attached with some wow factors to woo consumers."

Kwon didn't share many details on how he plans to resurrect LG's smartphone business, which has lost money for something like 14 quarters in a row now. When asked by the Korea Times, the site said Kwon "only reiterated LG Electronics' plan to expand the phone lineup." LG sold 19 phone models each in 2019 and 2018, according to GSM Arena's database. In 2014, the last time LG Mobile reliably turned a profit, the company produced 44 phone models—is this correlation or causation?

Monash University Associate Professor Matthew Hill, Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani, and Professor Mainak Majumder with the lithium-sulphur battery design. (credit: Monash University)

The name "lithium-ion battery" seems to imply that lithium is the essential ingredient that dictates the battery's performance characteristics. But that's less true than it appears. The electrodes that the lithium shuttles between are critical for dictating a battery's performance, which is why electrode materials played such a large role in the description of last year's Chemistry Nobel. Different electrode materials dictate the battery's performance in part based on dictating the energy difference between the charged and uncharged state. But they also determine how much lithium can be stored at an electrode, and through that the energy density of a battery.

There are a number of ideas floating around for new electrode materials that store lithium in fundamentally different ways: as solid lithium metal or as lithium oxide, which allows some of the electrode material to come from the air outside the battery. There are also chemicals that can store much more lithium per given area of volume. All of these options present serious issues (often more than one) that have kept them from being adopted so far. But a recent paper is promising a major breakthrough in something that has always been an attractive option for lithium storage: sulfur.

Alternate electrodes

"Holds lots of lithium" isn't a high bar to clear; if that was all we were looking for, some of these alternative electrode materials would be in use already. But there's a whole host of other characteristics: cheap and easy to work with, compatible with the chemistry of the rest of the battery components, holds up to repeated charge cycles, and so on.