Month: August 2023

Voyager Space, one of several US companies formulating concepts for new commercial space stations, has established a joint venture with Airbus to co-develop an Earth-orbiting research outpost called Starlab.

The companies announced the joint venture Wednesday, saying they plan to field a successor to the International Space Station. "The US-led joint venture will bring together world-class leaders in the space domain, while further uniting American and European interests in space exploration," the two companies said in a joint statement.

Voyager has been managing the development of a privately-owned space station called Starlab for several years. The Starlab station concept was one of three selected by NASA for funding in 2021, alongside with projects from separate industry teams led by Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman. Voyager's proposal took home the largest NASA funding award—$160 million—to go toward design and engineering work for the Starlab station through a cost-sharing public-private partnership arrangement.

Enlarge (credit: Meta)

Even the people who spent money on Meta's Ray-Ban "Stories" smart glasses don't want to use them. That's according to a report this week from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing internal data and claiming to detail the letdowns that led to hundreds of thousands of Stories gathering dust.

Meta (then called Facebook) released Ray-Ban Stories in 2021. The company's first mass-market smart glasses include a Snapdragon chip, two 5 MP front-facing cameras for snapping pictures or video, and speakers for listening to audio. Ray-Ban branding comes courtesy of the glasses' partnership with Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica (which also makes Oakleys and claims numerous luxury brands, including Burberry, Prada, Swarovski, and Tiffany & Co.).

But according to a February corporate document WSJ says it saw, under 10 percent of Ray-Ban Stories ever purchased are in active use. The publication reported that Meta sold 300,000 Stories, but there are just 27,000 monthly active users of the product.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Chris Foresman)

Apple posted its third-quarter earnings for 2023, and they were a bit of a mixed bag. Overall, the company beat the expectations of analysts who were expecting things to be grimmer, but hardware revenue was down compared to last year.

Almost all of Apple's hardware product categories sold less this quarter than they did in the same quarter in 2022. iPhone revenue was $39.67 billion, down 2 percent. Mac revenue dropped to $6.84 billion, down 7 percent. And the iPad fell the farthest percentage-wise: 20 percent, at $5.79 billion.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the drop in iPad sales could be attributed to the fact that Apple was riding high after a major iPad Air launch during this period last year, with nothing quite so exciting this time around. The Mac's revenue drop may be part of a larger trend in the PC market—consumers upgraded a bunch during a spree amid the COVID-19 pandemic, so many are satisfied with what they have for now.

Enlarge / A Waymo Jaguar I-Pace. (credit: Waymo)

Waymo is "doubling down" on its autonomous rideshare program with an expansion to another city. The company's fourth rideshare area will be Austin, Texas. The city is a hot spot of self-driving car activity, considering it's already home to a bunch of other projects from Cruise, Volkswagen, and (formerly) Argo.

Waymo says it wants its Austin service "to be a truly useful service from the start, traversing a large portion of the city night and day. The Waymo Driver will travel to many popular locations, like the heart of downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin, Hyde Park, and more."

Waymo says it will "begin an initial phase of operations this fall, with fully autonomous deployment and our first rides with the public in the months following." The company says it has been testing in Austin since March with its Jaguar I-Pace cars, but this isn't the company's first move in the city. Back in 2015, when Waymo had its goofy little "Firefly" cars with no steering wheels, the company was testing in Austin, where it famously let Steve Mahan, a legally blind person, go on the "world's first" public driverless car ride.

Enlarge / The Steam Deck. (credit: Valve)

Apple's macOS has been the second most popular operating system on the Steam game distribution platform for a long time, but that has now changed. Linux has surpassed macOS for the number two spot, according to Steam's July user hardware survey.

Steam regularly asks its users to give an anonymized look at their hardware, and the company makes the information it gathers available each month.

In July's survey, Windows was still reported by 96.21 percent of users' systems, so regardless of whether Linux or macOS comes in second, it's a decidedly distant second. Linux managed 1.96 percent, while macOS accounted for 1.84 percent of machines.