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Auction Team Breker

If you think today's Macs are expensive, hold on to your butts: on May 20, Auction Team Breker will sell one of just eight known working Apple I computers in existence. Breker estimates that the computer will sell for between $190,000 and $320,000, which is in line with the sale prices of most Apple I computers in recent years—outliers include a prototype model that sold for $815,000 in August of last year and a model from early in the computer's production run that sold for $905,000 in late 2014. Given the original $666.66 sale price (about $2,800 in today's dollars), any of those prices would be a pretty solid return on your investment.

The auction listing (PDF) claims that the Apple I is "the best-preserved example of an Apple I computer to have appeared on the market" and that it's coming directly from the collection of the Berkeley, California, resident who originally bought it. The auction includes not just the computer itself, but also instruction manuals, circuit board diagrams, and notes from a phone call with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

Enlarge / The Switch's JoyCon controllers in their Grip cradle. (credit: Mark Walton)

Last week, we warned readers not to get too excited in assuming that the Nintendo Switch's successful launch implied long-term success for the new platform. That said, the system remains nearly impossible to find at North American retailers nearly two weeks after its debut, which has led to a significant markup in price among third-party resellers.

A quick search of 90 completed eBay Switch sales over the past couple of days finds a median selling price of $440 for the Switch, a 47 percent markup over the $300 MSRP. The absolute lowest recent selling price for the system was $359, while one lucky seller managed to get $810 for his system just yesterday morning.

The markup remains high if The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is included with the system. The system/game bundles resell for a median price of $525 on eBay (46 percent above an MSRP of $360), even though the game itself isn't hard to find at all on retail shelves. A Switch with the harder-to-find, extra-packed limited edition Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, resells for a median of $624 (56 percent above the $400 MSRP).

Enlarge (credit: Keith Allison)

AT&T this week acknowledged that DirecTV has been charging the wrong regional sports fees to some customers and is now issuing bill credits to those who paid more because of the mistake.

"We have identified a small percentage of customers who are receiving some inaccurate bills for regional sports network fees," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars yesterday. "We are working as quickly as possible to notify those customers and issue credits. We apologize for the error.” AT&T bought DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV provider with about 21 million customers, in 2015.

The mistake affects bills going back to late January. Customers will not have to do anything to get the credit, as it will be issued automatically.

For the first time ever, Google is targeting children under 13 for account creation. The new "Google Family Link" app allows parents to make special Google accounts for kids under 13, which can be monitored and locked down. Right now the program is in a US-only, invite-only "early access" beta, and the child's device has the hefty requirement of running Android 7.0 Nougat and up.

In the US, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) restricts the collection of data on children under 13, requiring parental notification and consent. Previously Google complied with this law by banning kids under 13 from making an account. Google has created some kid-focused products in the past, namely YouTube Kids, but that app did not have a log-in feature—a bummer for anyone that wanted customization or their ad-free YouTube Red subscription to work.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 13: US President Donald J. Trump (C) delivers brief remarks before signing an executive order entitled, 'Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch', beside members of his Cabinet in the Oval Office of the White House on March 13, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Michael Reynolds-Pool | Getty Image)

Yesterday, the Trump administration released its first proposed budget outline. While this is just the first step in what will inevitably be extensive negotiations with Congress, it gives a clear indication of what Trump's priorities are. First and foremost, he is focused on the military, which will see a $54 billion increase in spending, offset by cuts or wholesale elimination of programs elsewhere. Science is clearly not a priority, as it is repeatedly targeted for cuts in every agency that funds it.

But those cuts aren't evenly distributed. NASA's budget is almost entirely unscathed, although Earth sciences research funded by the agency will be cut to expand funding elsewhere. The National Science Foundation, a major source of grants for fundamental research, isn't even mentioned, so there's no sense of how it will fare. And the harshest cuts appear to be directed at biomedical research, which will see a dramatic 20 percent drop in funding for the National Institutes of Health.

NIH hammered

For fiscal year 2018, the president's budget calls for a $15.1 billion cut to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a decrease of almost 18 percent. The proposed cuts to NIH would see the research agency lose $5.8 billion, dropping its budget from $31 billion to just $25.9 billion. Structural changes make the effective cuts closer to $6.3 billion, or over 20 percent. That would mean the smallest biomedical science budget since 2002. The real-world impact would be far greater, as biomedical research costs are increasing much faster than the rate of inflation.