Month: January 2023

Enlarge / If you want an Apple Genius to do this job, it's going to cost a bit more starting in March 2023. (credit: iFixit)

Starting in March 2023, having Apple replace the battery in your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook will cost a bit more, at least for those who didn't shell out for AppleCare+.

Battery replacements for the iPhone 12 and 13 lines, when out of warranty and not covered by AppleCare+, will cost $20 more starting March 1, according to a note on Apple's iPhone repair service page. Those repairs cost $69 until March, then $89. Those who purchased AppleCare+ can replace a battery that reports its maximum battery capacity as below 80 percent.

Several– "older" iPads will also see their battery replacement costs increase by $20. Those cutoffs include the 12.9-inch iPad Pros, fifth generation and older; 11-inch iPad Pro, third generation and older; the 10.5 and 9.7-inch iPad Pros; iPad minis older than sixth generation; and iPad Air older than fifth generation. An iPad Air fourth-generation battery replacement would, for example, cost $99 until March 1, then $119 after that.

Enlarge / The RTX 4070 Ti. (credit: Nvidia)

It’s still not what most people would consider “affordable,” but if you want to get into Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4000 series for less than $1,000, you’ll have a chance in a couple of days. The company’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will launch on January 5 starting at $799, $400 less than the MSRP of the RTX 4080 and $100 less than the originally planned 12GB version of the 4080.

As regulatory filings previously indicated, the RTX 4070 Ti is identical to the canceled 12GB version of the RTX 4080, which Nvidia "unlaunched" via a terse press release after widespread complaints about its branding and positioning. The 4070 Ti includes 12GB of GDDR6X memory on a 192-bit memory bus, plus 7,680 of Nvidia's CUDA cores, and it can consume up to 285 W of power (though Nvidia says average power draw when gaming is closer to 226 W).

Comparing spec sheets, the 4070 Ti on paper is a little less than half of an RTX 4090, which includes 24GB of RAM on a 384-bit memory bus and 16,384 CUDA cores. It's a bit closer to the RTX 4080, which has 16GB of memory on a 256-bit bus and 9,728 CUDA cores.

Enlarge (credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto)

The Elon Musk-owned Twitter is facing another lawsuit alleging that it failed to pay its bills.

The plaintiff in the latest case is Columbia REIT-650 California, LLC, the landlord of the 650 California Street office tower in San Francisco. Exhibit A in the lawsuit is a lease between Columbia REIT and CrossInstall, a mobile ad company purchased by Twitter in May 2020. All of CrossInstall's 70 employees joined Twitter at the time.

The lease was made in September 2017 for a period of seven years and covered 15,500 square feet, the entire 30th floor of the building. The annual rent started at $1.29 million, and the lease had automatic increases throughout the seven-year term.

Enlarge / Revelers celebrate New Year’s Eve in Times Square on January 1, 2023, in New York City. This year's New Year's Eve returned to pre-COVID-19 pandemic numbers, with around 1 million people estimated to fill Times Square. (credit: Getty | Alexi Rosenfeld)

A new omicron coronavirus subvariant dubbed XBB.1.5 now accounts for an estimated 40.5 percent of all US COVID-19 cases amid a winter wave that is driving up hospitalizations, particularly in places where XBB.1.5 is most prevalent.

Nationwide, new reported cases are hovering around 59,000 per day, which is still relatively low compared with previous waves. But case data has become murkier over the 3-year-old pandemic, with fewer testing sites available now and the results of common at-home tests going unreported. Additionally, data reporting generally lags around end-of-year holidays, meaning case reports may jump in the coming days as backlogged data rolls in.

Hospitalizations, however, are clearly rising, with an average of around 45,000 hospitalized per day, according to data tracking by The New York Times. National hospitalization rates now rival those from the peak over this past summer driven by bygone omicron subvariants, federal data shows. Some of the areas seeing the large upticks in hospitalizations are those where the new subvariant, XBB.1.5 is most prevalent. For instance, in the Northeast (federal health region 1), XBB.1.5 has the highest regional proportion, accounting for 75 percent of cases, and hospitalizations have risen 16 percent over the prior seven days, the largest region-specific rise, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.