Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Fortnite seen in the App Store on an iPhone on May 10, 2018. (credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

With Epic Games and Apple set to face off before a judge in their high-profile trial in just a few weeks, new court filings from both companies outline the evidence and arguments each intends to make in detail.

Unsurprisingly, each document paints a radically different picture of Apple's App Store and its role in the gaming and technology industry.

The disagreement between the two companies escalated publicly when Epic attempted to implement its own in-app payments system in Fortnite, one of the most popular games on Apple's App Store. This set into motion a series of events that led to Apple removing Fortnite from the App Store as Epic ran a social media campaign around the hashtag "#SaveFortnite," leveraging angry gamers against the tech giant.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by the biggest discount we've tracked for the Apple Watch Series 6, as the "Product (Red)" 40 mm version of Apple's latest high-end smartwatch is currently down to $320 at Amazon. You should see the full discount at checkout. This deal is $79 off Apple's MSRP and about $30 off the typical street price we've seen in recent months. The only catch is that it only applies to the red model, which may not suit everyone, though it's at least possible to swap in another band down the road if needed.

Though our review had some issues with the Apple Watch Series 6's sleep-tracking performance, we still generally found it to be an excellent smartwatch for activity monitoring and complementing an iPhone. The Apple Watch SE is still available for those who want to pay less, but it has a few trade-offs by comparison, most notably lacking an always-on display and ECG and blood oxygen measurements for health buffs.

If you don't need a new smartwatch, though, our deals roundup also has discounts on portable Bluetooth speakers, tons of Xbox and PlayStation games, Fitbit trackers, gaming monitors, Nest smart thermostats, and more. You can check out our full rundown below.

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday urged a federal judge in DC to reject Facebook's request to dismiss the FTC's high-stakes antitrust lawsuit. In a 56-page legal brief, the FTC reiterated its arguments that Facebook's profits have come from years of anticompetitive conduct.

"Facebook is one of the largest and most profitable companies in the history of the world," the FTC wrote. "Facebook reaps massive profits from its [social networking] monopoly, not by offering a superior or more innovative product because it has, for nearly a decade, taken anticompetitive actions to neutralize, hinder, or deter would-be competitors."

The FTC's case against Facebook focuses on two blockbuster acquisitions that Facebook made early in the last decade. In 2012, Facebook paid $1 billion for the fast-growing startup Instagram. While Instagram the company was still tiny—it had only about a dozen employees at the time of the acquisition—it had millions of users and was growing rapidly. Mark Zuckerberg realized it could grow into a serious rival for Facebook, and the FTC alleges Zuckerberg bought the company to prevent that from happening.

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  The Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2, with its wild center-bump design. [credit: Lenovo ]

We're not quite sure there's a huge demand for them, but ~$1,000 gaming phones are something manufacturers continue to push onto the market. If nothing else, they're at least interesting, and the latest entry, the "Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2," has one of the most extreme cooling solutions in a phone, ever.

The phone design revolves around the camera bump—it feels like underselling it to just call it a "camera bump"—smack in the middle of the phone body. This bump covers about 25 percent of the back of the phone and houses two cameras, an RGB LED lighting system, a landscape pop-up camera (!), and two internal cooling fans.

Lenovo's internal diagrams show a large amount of copper and graphite cooling plates inside the phone; the plates contribute to the phone's impressive 259 g weight. In landscape mode, it looks like the fan in the bottom-left corner of the rear bump is exposed to the outside world and pulls in cool air. The air then travels along copper ducting and can exit out the vent at the bottom or get blown out the top by a second, totally internal fan in the top-right corner of the rear bump.

Enlarge (credit: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Fallout from Texas’ statewide power outages in February continues to spread. Today, the Texas House of Representatives is scheduled to debate a bill that would require power producers to bear the costs of services that help keep the electrical grid stable.

If the bill passes, it would “unfairly shift the cost of ancillary electric services exclusively onto renewable generators rather than all the beneficiaries,” according to a letter written by the Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance (PREF), an industry group, and signed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Goldman Sachs, and a number of other firms. 

Amazon and other big tech firms have invested heavily in renewable power, seeking to spruce up their images while cutting their power bills. Costs for wind and solar have dropped precipitously in recent years, making investments in wind farms and solar plants attractive to power-hungry data center operators like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. 

Struggling video game retailer GameStop announced Thursday that it intends to name Chewy.com co-founder Ryan Cohen as chairman of its board of directors following its next stockholder meeting on June 9. The move seems likely to further encourage some investors who continue to be bullish on GameStop stock and see Cohen's plans to "transform" the retailer as a key part of its recent sky-high rise in valuation.

Cohen, who sold pet-supplies retailer Chewy to PetSmart for $3.5 billion in 2017, has traditionally been cautious with his investing strategy, putting money into big, safe stocks like Apple and Wells Fargo. But Cohen bought a roughly 10 percent stake in GameStop last August, when short sellers thought the already-depressed stock would continue to lose value. He increased that stake to 13 percent in December, earning a number of seats on the company's board in the process.

During his time with the retailer, Cohen hasn't been shy about pushing for GameStop to "promptly pivot from a brick-and-mortar mindset to a technology-driven vision," as he put it in a November SEC filing. "If GameStop takes practical steps to cut its excessive real estate costs and hire the right talent, it will have the resources to begin building a powerful e-commerce platform that provides competitive pricing, broad gaming selection, fast shipping, and a truly high-touch experience that excites and delights customers."