Month: May 2021

• 

  Oh no, iFixit, what are you doing? [credit: iFixit ]

Apple recently jumped into the thing-tracking market with the AirTag, a small coin-cell battery-powered Bluetooth device that you can attach to your stuff and ping with your smartphone. The device started shipping Friday, so of course, gadget teardown site iFixit has gotten ahold of one and ripped it apart—and then took a power drill to it?!

Like with most Apple products, it looks like some serious engineering went into the $29 tracker. The device is barely larger than the user-replaceable CR2032 battery that powers it, putting competing devices like the Tile and Samsung Galaxy SmartTags to shame with their comparative bulk. Inside, a single circuit board uses a unique donut-shaped design that crams all the components into a ring under the battery.

The hole in the middle of the circuit board lets Apple pack in a surprisingly huge voice coil speaker. The speaker is just for playing ringtones so you can find your AirTagged thing when you lose it, but apparently, the ringtones will be super high quality. For comparison, the Tile and Samsung trackers both use cheap little piezoelectric speakers for ringtone playback, which iFixit rightfully points out would be right at home in a "McDonald's Happy Meal toy." This speaker is just for acoustic location, so anything that will make a shrill noise will work—Apple is just going for luxurious over-engineering.

Enlarge / Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, on Wednesday, April 21, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Verizon announced on Monday that it is selling Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion to private-equity firm Apollo Global Management. Verizon made the deal official just a few days after news reports said that Verizon had put Yahoo and AOL up for sale. The media division will be known just as "Yahoo" after the sale is completed later this year.

Verizon purchased AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion and Yahoo in 2017 for $4.5 billion, even though the once-dominant Internet brands had fallen from prominence years before. Verizon's attempt to compete against Google and Facebook in the online advertising market didn't work out, leading to a series of layoffs and a goodwill impairment charge of about $4.6 billion.

Verizon tried to put a positive spin on the sale in today's press release, saying that the Yahoo/AOL division known as Verizon Media is "one of the world's premier global technology and media companies." Besides Yahoo and AOL, Verizon Media includes "leading ad tech and media platform businesses," Verizon said.

Enlarge / Whoever wins this case will get a llama full of prizes.

It's been nine months since Epic set off its legal battle with Apple over the right to include alternative payment options in the iOS version of Fortnite. After months of pre-trial arguments and maneuvering, the case goes to trial Monday before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California.

The bench trial, which is expected to last three weeks, will center on the question of what it means to have "monopoly power" in the market for downloadable phone apps. The final outcome could produce huge ripple effects throughout the multi-billion dollar smartphone market, as well as other digital app delivery platforms.

How did we get here?

On August 13, 2020, Epic used an unreviewed "hotfix" update to add an "Epic Direct Payment" option to the standard Apple App Store and Google Play payment options for microtransactions in the mobile versions of its hit free-to-play game Fortnite. By using Direct Payments, players could get a 20 percent discount over the "standard" payment methods, which Epic said was a way to pass on some of the savings that Epic enjoyed by going around the 30% cuts taken by the OS makers' mobile storefronts.