Month: May 2021

Enlarge / Ford's range of all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup trucks will start at just $39,974 before tax credits. (credit: Ford)

On Wednesday night, the Ford Motor Company unveiled its latest pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning. The truck is the hotly anticipated battery-electric version of Ford's bestselling vehicle, and when it goes on sale in mid-2022, it will join the Mustang Mach-E and the electric Transit van as part of Ford's battery EV lineup.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden visited Ford's Rouge factory in Michigan and gave the world an impromptu demo of how quickly the F-150 Lightning can accelerate.

The answer is around four seconds to 60 mph, at least when the truck is fitted with an extended-range battery. But a more important headline figure is the truck's price. Remarkably, Ford is not targeting the upper end of its consumer base with the F-150 Lightning. Although you'll be able to option a Lightning out the wazoo like you can with any other F-150, Ford will sell basic models with the (smaller) standard battery pack, aimed at commercial use, for $39,974 before tax credits.

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  Actual beta screenshots show off the volume controls (which change no colors) and lockscreen notifications. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Along with the kick-off of Google I/O, the first Android 12 Beta (Developer Preview 4) came out yesterday. In addition to the usual Pixel release, Google says that OnePlus, Lenovo, Asus, Oppo, Realme, Sharp, Tecno, TCL, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE are all putting out compatible releases for certain models, usually their current flagship smartphones. Android 12 had a major redesign announced at Google I/O, but a lot of that is not present in the beta: we're supposed to get a color-changing UI, new widgets, and a privacy dashboard. None of that is in the beta yet. You do get plenty of progress in the notification panel, lock screen, and a few new animation effects, but it's all incomplete right now—as you would expect.

Google's sizzle reel and mockups for the next version of Material Design, called "Material You," look great in canned videos and with carefully curated app mockups. But the real question is how quickly and comprehensively will Google implement Material You. If everything quickly gets a cohesive design, that's great—but if half of Google's apps are on the new design and half are on the old design, that's not so great. Dark Mode was introduced in Android 10 in 2019, and the whole Google ecosystem took about 1.5 years to catch up. Google Maps was the last big Dark Mode straggler with a release coming in February 2021, and just when things were settling down, it's time to change the design again.

Google also detailed ways third-party apps can get in on the color-extraction API that powers Android 12's Pixel theme. This is something that will probably be cool for smaller apps made to fit into the Android design, but most big third-party developers have been resistant to Google's Material Design uniformity. After the initial launch with Android 5.0, many of the follow-up Material Design iterations were about "expressing your brand" with more flexible design guidance. That means Facebook still wants to look like Facebook and wants everything to be blue, while Spotify wants to look like Spotify and make everything green and black.

Enlarge / Robert Kramer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Emergent BioSolutions, speaks via videoconference during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 19, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Stefani Reynolds-Pool / Getty Images)

When contract-manufacturer Emergent BioSolutions contaminated at least 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine and millions more doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine at its Baltimore facility earlier this year, the company had been collecting monthly payments of $27 million from the US government—payments intended to help Emergent avoid just such a manufacturing disaster.

That’s according to a preliminary report from a Congressional investigation, conducted by two House committees—the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis and the Committee on Oversight and Reform. The report was released today and includes a number of troubling new details about the ongoing Emergent scandal.

The monthly “reservation fees” Emergent received were paid out of a questionable $628 million contract from May 2020. The money was intended to help Emergent maintain a state of “cleanliness and readiness” to produce vaccine under proper manufacturing standards and practices. But, as Ars previously reported, an inspection by the Food and Drug Administration in April found that to be far from the case.

Enlarge / Laura Donnelly stars as Amalia True in HBO's Victorian-era sci-fi drama, The Nevers. (credit: HBO)

I'm not sure what I was expecting from the midseason finale for The Nevers, HBO's inventive and alluring science fiction drama set in Victorian England. But I certainly didn't foresee being so disoriented that I briefly wondered if HBO Max had started airing an entirely different series by mistake. I won't spoil the finale for you, but let's just say that the revelations in that sixth episode set up a radical new direction for the series. I'm curious to see if the writers can stick the landing when the second half of the season eventually airs.

(Some mild spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

As I've written previously, HBO won a fierce bidding war and approved a straight-to-series order in 2018, with Joss Whedon (The Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, etc.) as writer, director, executive producer, and showrunner. Whedon brought Douglas Petrie and Jane Espenson—both of whom worked with Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer—on board as additional writers/executive producers. Last November, Whedon announced he was quitting the project, citing exhaustion and the "physical challenges of making such a huge show during a global pandemic." British screenwriter Philippa Goslett (Little Ashes, How to Talk to Girls at Parties) took over as showrunner soon after.

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  SignTime will allow Apple's customers to get product and retail support in sign language. [credit: Apple ]

On Wednesday, Apple announced a bunch of new accessibility features coming to iPhones, iPads, and the Apple Watch. The new features and services will roll out in the coming days, weeks, and months.

The first feature to arrive will be a new service called SignTime, which Apple says will launch tomorrow, May 20. SignTime will allow users to communicate with Apple's customer service representatives (either AppleCare or Retail Customer Care) using sign language. The service will launch first in the US, UK, and France with American Sign Language, British Sign Language, and French Sign Language, respectively. Further, customers at Apple Stores will be able to use SignTime to get in touch with an interpreter while shopping or getting customer support without having to make an appointment in advance.

While SignTime's arrival is right around the corner, software updates loaded with new features aimed at making Apple's software and hardware more accessible for people with cognitive, mobility, hearing, and vision disabilities will hit Apple's platforms sometime later this year.