Month: October 2023

Enlarge / A box of Paxlovid, the Pfizer antiviral drug. (credit: Getty | Europa Press News)

After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than fourfold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and health care costs.

The price of the drug is already $530 for a treatment course. That's what the US government paid for the drug in the emergency phase of the pandemic. But, as the drug moves from government distribution to the commercial market this year, the price is expected to increase. So far, it's unclear what the new price will be.

In a company investor call Monday, Bourla said only that the "pandemic price" of $530 is likely to be "lesser" than the commercial price and that negotiations are beginning.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Juj Winn)

Twenty phone companies may soon have all their voice calls blocked by US carriers because they didn't submit real plans for preventing robocalls on their networks.

The 20 carriers include a mix of US-based and foreign voice service providers that submitted required "robocall mitigation" plans to the Federal Communications Commission about two years ago. The problem is that some of the carriers' submissions were blank pages and others were bizarre images or documents that had no relation to robocalls.

The strange submissions, according to FCC enforcement orders issued yesterday, included "a .PNG file depicting an indiscernible object," a document titled "Windows Printer Test Page," an image "that depicted the filer's 'Taxpayer Profile' on a Pakistani government website," and "a letter that stated: 'Unfortunately, we do not have such a documents.'"

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  The new $79 Apple Pencil. [credit: Apple ]

Apple has announced a new version of its popular Pencil peripheral for the iPad. Simply dubbed "Apple Pencil" yet again, it is the cheapest option to carry the name yet.

The new Pencil is priced at $79; that's $20 cheaper than the first-generation Apple Pencil and $50 cheaper than the second generation. Apple says it will work with any iPad model with a USB-C port.

In fact, the new Pencil has a USB-C port. That means you'll use a USB-to-USB cable to charge it on your iPad, Mac, USB-C iPhone, charging brick, or whatever. The USB-C port is subtly hidden behind a sliding cap. This is a big improvement over the awkward "plug your Pencil into the iPad's port" solution of old.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could create some handy connections for their car.

One CX60 driver had a charger that would only power on when it confirmed his car was plugged in and would alert him if he left the trunk open. Another used Home Assistant to control their charger based on the dynamic prices of an Agile Octopus energy plan. Yet another had really thought it through, using Home Assistant to check the gas before their morning commute, alert them if their windows were down before rain was forecast, and remotely unlock and start the car in cold conditions. The possibilities were vast, and purportedly beyond what Mazda's official app offered.

Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler. In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler's integration:

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

The Android ecosystem is hurtling toward a RISC-V future. The puzzle pieces for the up-and-coming CPU architecture started falling into place this past year when Google announced official RISC-V support in Android and plans to make it a "tier 1 platform" on equal footing with Arm. With the OS support underway, what we need now is hardware, and Qualcomm is stepping up to announce the first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC.

It doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it's developing a "RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to "commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US." For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone's first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it's the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out "will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance."

RISC-V represents a big threat to the Arm CPU architecture that currently dominates all mobile devices. RISC-V architecture is open source, which can make it cheaper and more flexible than Arm. If companies want to design their own chips, they can do that without paying a licensing fee to Arm. Since the architecture is open source, it's possible to create a fully open source chip. If you're a chip-design firm, you can make your own proprietary chip designs and license them, making you a competitor to Arm's chip-design business.