Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Pedestrians walk past Biogen Inc. headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Monday, June 7, 2021. Biogen Inc. shares soared after its controversial Alzheimer's disease therapy was approved by US regulators. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Concern is mounting over the price of the controversial new Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm. Advocates, lawmakers, and critics worry in particular about what the drug’s $56,000 per-year list price will do to Medicare. The federal insurance program is available to those age 65 and over, which covers the vast majority of the roughly 6 million adults with Alzheimer’s in the US.

As it stands, the cost of Aduhlem—a doctor-administered intravenous drug—has the potential to eclipse the amount of money Medicare spends on all other doctor-administered drugs and retail prescription drugs combined.

The Food and Drug Administration granted approval of Aduhelm earlier this month, sparking widespread and intense criticism. Experts and industry watchers have called the decision “disgraceful” and “dangerous,” noting that clinical trials of Aduhelm did not clearly show that the drug is actually effective at treating Alzheimer’s. The fact that Aduhelm’s maker, Biogen, set the list price so high only intensified the criticism.

Enlarge / A sign in front of an AT&T retail store on May 17, 2021, in San Rafael, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

AT&T says fiber Internet is a "superior" technology that is built for today and the future because of its ability to deliver symmetrical upload and download speeds of 1Gbps and higher. AT&T also says that "there is no compelling evidence" to support the deployment of fiber across the US and that rural people should be satisfied with nonfiber Internet access that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds.

The difference between those two wildly different statements was the audience. AT&T's message about fiber's future-proof nature and its superiority over cable and DSL was delivered to investors while AT&T discussed the incremental fiber expansion in which it is hooking up more homes in metro areas where it already offers fiber. By contrast, AT&T's message that Americans don't need fiber access was delivered to the US government while the ISP lobbied against government-subsidized construction of fiber lines that are clearly superior to the DSL and fixed wireless home-Internet products that AT&T sells in areas where it decided that fiber is not cost-effective.

As we reported on March 29, AT&T is fighting proposals to subsidize nationwide fiber, writing that "there would be significant additional cost to deploy fiber to virtually every home and small business in the country, when at present there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps product." That refers to 50Mbps download speeds with 10Mbps upload speeds or 100Mbps downloads with 20Mbps uploads.

Enlarge / Xbox Game Streaming works on a wide variety of devices—and they all now benefit from Microsoft's upgraded servers. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Microsoft)

Microsoft continues flipping crucial switches and toggles for its cloud-powered Xbox Game Streaming service, and this week's update is easily the biggest yet. The Xbox Game Streaming service has taken an official leap onto all web browsers and iOS devices.

Should you subscribe to the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service, priced at $15/mo, you can now visit xbox.com/play on supported web browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge) and immediately enter a cloud-gaming instance that resembles the likes of Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, and Nvidia GeForce Now. Connect a controller to your preferred gaming device, then connect to your lowest-latency connection possible, and you'll have access to a library of over 260 games as powered by a Microsoft Azure server instance. (Without a gamepad, many games won't work, though some titles have received Xbox Game Streaming updates to add virtual touchscreen controls should you play on a smartphone.) My most recent article about Game Pass clarifies how its pricing and game selection differ from aforementioned rivals.

This follows Microsoft's late-2020 promise to get Xbox's cloud service running via an HTML5 interface, which, among other things, would get Xbox Game Streaming to work on Apple's otherwise restrictive iOS ecosystem. Both Xbox and Stadia faced Apple's smackdown in terms of App Store rules that would require every game in their service to receive an individual Apple review and rating process, despite the fact that media-streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ don't receive the same scrutiny for their individual TV series and films. (Without a dedicated Xbox Game Streaming app on iOS, you'll need to create a web shortcut within iOS Safari to add an app-like shortcut to your iPhone or iPad.)