Month: September 2023

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

California, the home to many of tech's biggest companies and the nation's most populous state, is pushing ahead with a right-to-repair bill for consumer electronics and appliances. After unanimous votes in the state Assembly and Senate, the bill passed yesterday is expected to move through a concurrence vote and be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

"Since Right to Repair can pass here, expect it to be on its way to a backyard near you," said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens in a statement. iFixit, a seller of repair parts and tools and advocate for right-to-repair laws, based in San Luis Obispo, California, was joined in its support for the California repair law by another California company with a history of opposing repair laws: Apple. The consumer tech giant's letter urging passage of the bill was surprising, to say the least, though Apple said that the bill's stipulations for "individual users' safety" and "product manufacturers' intellectual property" were satisfactory.

California's bill goes further than right-to-repair laws in other states. Rather than limiting its demand that companies provide parts, tools, repair manuals, and necessary software for devices that are still actively sold, California requires that vendors provide those items for products sold after July 1, 2021, starting in July 2024. Products costing $50 to $99.99 must be accompanied by those items for three years, and items $100 and more necessitate seven years. The bill also provides for stronger enforcement mechanisms, allowing for municipalities to bring superior court cases rather than contact the state attorney general.

Enlarge / The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. facility under construction in Phoenix, Arizona, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

A new report has revealed that America may be quickly approaching a major roadblock in its bid to become a global chips leader by the end of the decade. Employees of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—which is leagues ahead of competitors in mass production of advanced chips— told The Information that TSMC has no plans to build a packaging facility in the US.

This likely means that thousands of chips that will eventually be manufactured at a $40 billion fab in Arizona—which is scheduled to be operational in 2025—will ultimately still have to be shipped to Taiwan for packaging. That's a problem, since President Joe Biden introduced the CHIPS and Science Act to reduce US reliance on Taiwan facilities amid China's ongoing threats to invade and possibly take over Taiwan. It would almost seem to defeat the point of building fabs in the US if the US-made chips still ultimately need to be packaged and shipped back from overseas.

TSMC's Arizona fab is a critical part of Biden's plan to design and produce "leading-edge logic chips" that power computers, smartphones, servers, and supercomputers, according to a 2023 report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Construction on the fab has already been delayed, due to what TSMC called a lack of skilled US workers.

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Frank Rubio observes the behavior of a free-flying water bubble inside the International Space Station's Kibo laboratory module. (credit: NASA)

Eleven days before Christmas last year, a micrometeoroid struck a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station. This ruptured the vehicle's cooling system, creating a dramatic spray of coolant for hours into space before there was none left.

Prior to this accidental strike, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio had been planning to come home by around spring break of 2023 to see his wife, Deborah, and four children. For his debut spaceflight, six months in space was enough for the former helicopter pilot and flight surgeon.

But eventually Russian and US engineers determined that the Soyuz spacecraft that he and two Russian crewmates—cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin—had flown to the space station may not be safe for the return journey home. The crew compartment was likely to overheat. So that damaged vehicle was flown home without anyone on board, and a replacement Soyuz flew autonomously to the station.

Enlarge / Electrify America promised a lot when it first arrived, but now it mostly promises frustration and broken hardware. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Wednesday the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation announced it is accepting applications for grants to improve electric vehicle charger reliability. The Joint Office has $100 million to spend in this area to fund grants to repair or replace malfunctioning or broken EV chargers. The money was set aside as part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which allocated $5 billion for a national network of EV chargers by 2027.

"We know that people expect public EV chargers to work the first time, every time," said Joint Office of Energy and Transportation Executive Director Gabe Klein. "That's why we have a multi-pronged approach to create a seamless charging experience by building a capable workforce, tracking reliability metrics, and convening industry to ensure they can meet the performance standards for federally funded chargers set earlier this year."

"This funding to repair and replace non-operational chargers combined with the efforts of the ChargeX Consortium should increase reliability significantly over the next two years,” said Klein.

Enlarge / SpaceX Starlink satellite dish at Pelican Beach on Willard Bay Reservoir in Willard, Utah, in October 2022. (credit: Tony Webster (CC BY-SA 2.0))

SpaceX's Starlink division hasn't come close to meeting customer and revenue projections that the company shared with investors before building the satellite network, according to a Wall Street Journal report published today.

A 2015 presentation that "SpaceX used to raise money from investors" reportedly projected that in 2022, Starlink would hit 20 million subscribers and generate nearly $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in operating profit. The WSJ said it obtained the 2015 presentation and recent documents with numbers on Starlink's actual performance in 2022.

Actual Starlink revenue for 2022 was $1.4 billion, up from $222 million in 2021, according to the report. The documents apparently didn't specify whether Starlink is profitable.

Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For years, the Unity Engine has earned goodwill from developers large and small for its royalty-free licensing structure, which meant developers incurred no extra costs based on how well a game sold. That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.

The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers. Those on the Unity Personal tier (which includes free basic Editor access) will be charged $0.20 per install after an individual game reaches $200,000 in annual revenue and 200,000 lifetime installs.

Users of Unity's Pro and Enterprise tiers (which charge a separate annual subscription for access to a more full-featured Unity Editor) will pay slightly smaller per-install fees starting at $0.125 to $0.15 after a game reaches $1 million in annual revenue and 1 million total installs. The per-install fees for the paid subscription tiers are also subject to "volume discounts" for heavily installed games, going down as low as $0.01 per install for games that are installed 1 million times per month.