Month: April 2021

Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing new products in the company's April 20, 2021, livestream. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Apple released its Q2 2021 earnings report to investors today after the bell, and it was another huge year—so huge, in fact, that investors are concerned it's not sustainable as the world enters a new, later phase of the pandemic.

Revenue for the quarter was $89.58 billion, a record for the March quarter, and up 54 percent year-over-year. The number surpassed investors' and analysts' predictions and expectations leading up to the report. Gross margin was 42.5 percent.

Apple reported double-digit growth in every product category. Mac and iPad revenue were up 70.1 percent and 78.9 percent from last year ($9.10 billion and $7.8 billion, respectively), and the iPhone was up 65.5 percent (to $47.94 billion). Both Apple CEO Tim Cook and analysts have called the iPhone 12 launch a "super cycle," in which adoption, upgrades, and sales are particularly strong due to various factors.

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  Rumor has it Calibri is already working on its goodbye note. [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

In tech, all good defaults (that aren't the Mac startup chime, at least) must some day come to an end. Today, Microsoft announced its Office font since 2007—the everyman sans serif, Calibri—would soon join Clippy, Internet Explorer, and the Windows 8 Start button in the big Windows graveyard in the sky.

"Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office," the Microsoft Design Team opined in Calibri's de facto obit. "It has served us all well, but we believe it's time to evolve."

Microsoft is now on the hunt for tech's next great default font. Rather than going the reality competition route and opening up the search to any old handwritten font family, the company has commissioned five custom fonts that will now vie for this cushy gig.

Enlarge / A Verizon booth at Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles in September 2018. (credit: Verizon)

US mobile customers are almost never able to connect to millimeter-wave networks even though the cellular industry and Verizon in particular have spent years hyping the fastest form of 5G.

AT&T and T-Mobile customers with devices capable of using millimeter-wave networks were connected to mmWave 5G only 0.5 percent of the time during the 90-day period between January 16 and April 15, 2021, according to an OpenSignal report released today. Even on Verizon, the carrier with the most aggressive rollout of mmWave 5G, users with compatible devices spent 0.8 percent of their time on the high-frequency network that uses its large capacity to provide faster speeds than low- and mid-band spectrum.

Average download speeds on mmWave 5G were 232.7Mbps for AT&T, 215.3Mbps for T-Mobile, and 692.9Mbps for Verizon. You can see the average time connected to mmWave 5G and the average speeds in these charts from OpenSignal:

Enlarge / Chairman Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) (right) speaks with Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law hearing April 27, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee is hearing testimony on the effect social media companies' algorithms and design choices have on users and discourse. (credit: Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images)

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, there was a striking change of scenery—rather than grilling the floating heads of Big Tech CEOs, senators instead questioned policy leads from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube on the role algorithms play in their respective platforms. The panel also heard from two independent experts in the field, and the results were less theatrical and perhaps more substantive.

Both Democrats and Republicans expressed concerns over how algorithms were shaping discourse on social platforms and how those same algorithms can drive users toward ever more extreme content. “Algorithms have great potential for good,” said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). “They can also be misused, and we the American people need to be reflective and thoughtful about that.”

The Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter execs all emphasized how their companies’ algorithms can be helpful in achieving shared goals—they are working to find and remove extremist content, for example—though all the execs admitted de-radicalizing social media was a work in progress.

Enlarge / A woman watches a mask—a part used in wafer conception—at a show room of the 12-inch United Microelectronics Corp (UMC) factory in Tainan, southern Taiwan. (credit: Sam Yeh | Getty)

United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), the world’s fourth-largest contract chipmaker, is expanding its capacity to produce mature technology chips in exchange for financial guarantees, in response to the shortage gripping the global semiconductor supply chain.

UMC said it would add capacity for manufacturing 20,000 wafers a month at 28 nm, one of the process technology nodes worst-hit by the global chip shortage, at an existing fabrication plant, or “fab,” in Tainan.

The investment will drive up the company’s capital spending for this year by 53 percent to $2.3 billion, but it is made under a deal that commits several of UMC’s largest customers to pay deposits upfront and guarantee certain orders at a fixed price.