Month: September 2020

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  Artist's concept of the Spectrum rocket launching. [credit: Isar Aerospace ]

Some space entrepreneurs in Germany believe that the European launch industry—which principally consists of the state-backed Arianespace corporation—is ripe for disruption.

The industry, they say, mirrors that of the United States more than a decade ago, before SpaceX emerged onto the scene and began to disrupt the near-monopoly held by United Launch Alliance. SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, and the company followed that with the Falcon 9 booster less than two years later. Since then, it has forced competitors to innovate and put downward pressure on launch prices.

"Europe is where the US launch industry was 15 years ago," said Daniel Metzler, co-founder and chief executive of the Munich-based Isar Aerospace rocket company, in an interview.

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  This dayglo assault of orange and volt green is the (deep breath) 2020 Porsche Cayenne Coupé Turbo S E-Hybrid. It's the top-of-the-range Cayenne and also a plug-in. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

The car you picture when someone says "Porsche" probably isn't an SUV. Yet these days, most of the vehicles that Porsche builds are SUVs. Last year, it sold nearly 100,000 Macans and more than 92,000 Cayennes. Add up all the 911s and 718s and Panameras across the same 12 months and you only get 88,000.

I offer these numbers to say that SUVs keep the lights on at Porsche. And when the company's engineers are called upon to build one, they make sure that it's packed full of Porsche attitude. It's the same attitude that has spent decades proving that, actually, you can put the engine behind a car's rear wheels and still make a safe-handling sports car. A Macan or a Cayenne has to also be a Porsche as much as it is an SUV. If you just want German luxury, you'll find it cheaper—and more luxurious—at Audi, BMW, or Mercedes-Benz.

But if cheap German luxury is what you're looking for, the 2020 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid Coupé is definitely not the SUV for you. It's the most expensive Porsche SUV you can buy—a base price of $164,400 before one hits the notoriously expansive, expensive options list. It's an awful lot of money for a car, whichever way you slice it.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Android 11 has finally arrived after a lengthy beta process that started approximately three years ago in February 2020. This is the 30th release of Android, if we're counting by API levels, and in a year when it seems nearly everything has been delayed or canceled, Google has managed to turn in one of the smaller Android releases.

Last year, Android 10 was a massive release, adding gesture navigation, a dark mode, Project Mainline, a dual-boot system, scoped storage, foldable smartphone support, and a million other things. In comparison, Android 11 is more limited. This being the annual Ars Technica review, however, there are of course still plenty of things to talk about—like yet another notification panel revamp, a new media player, chat bubbles, smart home controls, and more.

Table of Contents

• The notification panel
• The persistent media carousel
• Conversations and bubbles
• Notification history
• One-time and auto-revoking permissions
• The new power menu and smart home controls
• Get better smart home support, Google
• Emoji 13.0
• Project Mainline, Part 2—Even more modularity
• Google's Scoped Storage brinkmanship
• Keyboard autofill gets a big upgrade
• Grab bag
• Building on Android 10, with a few upgrades of its own
• The good
• The bad
• The ugly

The notification panel

The notification panel is one of the biggest strengths of Android, and Google can't seem to let a major release go by without iterating on it. This year, the theme seems to be around organization and creating what Google calls a "dedicated persistent space" for certain types of notifications.