Month: March 2021

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The auto industry continues to suffer the effects of a worldwide shortage of silicon chips. General Motors will idle production of midsize pickup trucks at a factory in Missouri until April 12 and extend the shutdown of another factory in Michigan. In South Korea, Hyundai Motor Group, which had been unaffected so far, now says it expects to have production problems in April due to the shortage. And if that wasn't enough, a fire at a factory in Japan will further exacerbate the problem.

The chip shortage got started with the COVID-19 pandemic. As countries around the world went into lockdown in 2020 to combat the virus's spread, many automakers saw their sales evaporate at the same time as public health measures forced the closure of some factories. Consequently, some of these companies cancelled pending orders for chips, which resulted in the foundries switching to fulfilling other orders. But as demand for new vehicles started to pick up, the OEMs discovered that it would be some time before their chip suppliers could meet these new orders, as the chip factories had no spare capacity.

In February, GM said it had to halt production at factories in Kansas, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and South Korea as it prioritized more profitable product lines. Some of those plant closures will continue until April, the company now says. It will now also idle a factory in Missouri that currently builds GMC Canyon and Chevrolet Colorado midsize pickups, until April 12 at the earliest. And another GM factory in Michigan will idle two weeks earlier than planned in late May. And while it is keeping its full-size truck production steady, some of the pickups are leaving the production line without a chip that enables their 5.3 L V8 engines to deactivate certain cylinders for better fuel efficiency.

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  iWork on iOS. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

This week, Apple updated its suite of iWork apps for both iOS and macOS. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are now in version 11.0, and while the changes aren't dramatic, there are some small quality-of-life tweaks here.

On iOS, most of the listed updates apply to every app in the suite. They include onscreen keypads for entering numerical values in places where that wasn't as easy to do before, the ability to make edit mode the default viewing mode for every document you open, new editing controls in the Arrange Inspector, a new gesture for adding or removing objects, and the ability to include phone number links.

Numbers has one minor, app-specific change: you can now exclude the summary worksheet when you export your spreadsheet to Excel.

Enlarge / Android on the Nintendo Switch. Just think of all the Nintendo apps you're missing out on. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Here's a wild report from Android Police's David Ruddock: Qualcomm is planning to build an Android-powered Nintendo Switch clone. This device would be a gaming-focused tablet with serious cooling and detachable side controllers. The Switch is powered by Nvidia's Tegra SoC and Nintendo's top-flight game designers, while this Qualcomm... game console (?) would be powered by a Snapdragon chip and run Play Store games. Qualcomm apparently plans to launch this thing in Q1 2022.

According to the report, the device would attempt to "showcase the company's Snapdragon chipsets in a less traditional form factor." This new form factor would be thicker than a normal smartphone and come with a 6000 mAh battery. Ruddock says that "the company believes that the added thermal headroom a thicker design affords will make its processor run faster and significantly more efficiently than a modern ultra-thin smartphone."

The report says Qualcomm is using "a premium supplier" to manufacture the Joy-Con-style controllers, and that, like a Switch, the device will support video-out for gaming on a TV. An SD slot will reportedly let you pack the device with games, and the system will run Android 12, Google's suite of apps, and a custom launcher. As a Qualcomm device, it will, of course, feature the latest 5G connectivity, but the report says, "We do not believe any version of the console will function as a standalone mobile handset (i.e., have telephony features)."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )

Tesla has begun accepting bitcoin as payment from car buyers in the continental US, and CEO Elon Musk said the company plans to expand the new payment option to other countries later this year.

Musk announced the news on Twitter today. "You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin... Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency," Musk wrote.

Tesla recently bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin, a move that sent the cryptocurrency's price soaring. A Tesla regulatory filing last month on February 8 said the company would begin accepting bitcoin as payment "in the near future." While Musk is betting big on bitcoin, customers may prefer to buy Tesla cars in dollars if they expect the price of bitcoin to keep rising.

Enlarge / It may take more than one bad earnings report to pop this bubble...

The last time GameStop announced its quarterly earnings, in early December, the stock market valued the video game retailer at about $1 billion. Following a worse-than-expected earnings report released Tuesday night, the company now has a market cap of just under $10 billion as of Wednesday morning.

Sure, that's down roughly 18 percent from Tuesday's closing price, and off roughly 44 percent from a January peak that saw the stock offering become a poster child for the retail investor-driven "meme stock" phenomenon. Still there's not much in this week's report to suggest that GameStop as a company is worth ten times as much as it was just three months ago, much less the higher valuations it briefly enjoyed in the interim.

Signs of a turnaround?

Overall, GameStop's latest earnings report shows a company still struggling to turn itself around. For the full fiscal year, the company lost $215 million on net, improving on a net loss of just over $470 million the year prior. Net sales for the year were down over 21 percent, to $5.09 billion, a decline GameStop blamed in part on its "de-densification efforts" (i.e. closing nearly 700 stores). Even taking that move into account, though, sales for comparable stores were down 9.5 percent for the year.