Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Apple One tiers. (credit: Apple)

Apple’s all-in-one subscription services bundle, Apple One, launches today, according to a confirmation given to Bloomberg by Apple CFO Luca Maestri.

CEO Tim Cook also confirmed the bundle’s imminent launch on the company’s quarterly investor call yesterday.

Apple One offers three plans: individual, family, and premier. Each offers some subset or combination of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, iCloud, Apple News+, and soon, Apple Fitness+.

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  The new Moto Razr. It's got updated specs and a slightly different design. [credit: Motorola ]

If you buy a new Moto Razr 5G, it might not seem all that "new" when you get it. A very interesting note (first spotted by The Verge) is at the bottom of the Amazon product description, which says that your Moto Razr will be opened before it gets to you, it's going to be folded, and, oh, we're sorry if there are some fingerprints:

NOTE: originally, RAZR was meant to be shipped in the unfolded position. However, to better protect the display, we have folded your RAZR – it’s safer but may not look as elegant as we hoped. We apologize if you see fingerprints on your device. We assure you your RAZR is brand new.

Motorola's foldable reboot of the Moto Razr has had a tough time surviving in the real world. While the modern take on a classic smartphone looks beautiful, it has also proven extremely fragile, with the trick hinge system and soft, plastic flexible display being prone to damage. (Ours died after one day!) The original released in February 2020, but a sequel with better specs, the Moto Razr "5G," already came out at the beginning of October. Already, it has been decided that the box isn't good enough.

The Razr 5G box looks just like the original Razr reboot box, and it doesn't follow your typical smartphone box design. The bottom half of the box is designed to double as a functional phone stand, and it actually amplifies the sound coming out of the speaker. The phone sits in the bottom of the box vertically, opened up, and tilted back slightly. The top "half" of the box lowers down over top of the phone stand assembly, and a very large foam block presses against the phone display, keeping the phone in place.

Enlarge / They're back! (credit: Lucasfilm)

Last year, Disney dropped The Mandalorian, a Disney+ exclusive Star Wars TV series, into one of its most crowded entertainment years of all time. Avengers Endgame un-snapped the world. Leia and Kylo died. Heck, the company released three live-action remakes of cartoon classics last year.

This year, a new season of The Mandalorian no longer has the benefit of being a behind-the-Rise surprise, nor part of a massive Disney entertainment barrage. It arrives with expectations, interest, and—in a pandemic-stricken world—little else in the way of competition.

But you wouldn't know that watching Mando and "The Child" return to TV screens early this morning. Series creator Jon Favreau once again writes and directs the new season's first episode, and in doing so, he places a firm first step into a comfortable foothold. In Mandalorian terms, that means viewers will find another entertaining interpretation of the "space cowboy" motif that last year's season delivered so well.

Enlarge / The close-ups highlight the bright ice exposed in the boulders when Philae struck them during its second touchdown (green box above). (credit: O'Rourke et al./Nature)

The Rosetta mission’s attempt to drop the Philae lander on a comet in 2014 didn’t go according to plan. The harpoon mechanism meant to stick Philae to terra-not-quite-firma didn’t work, and poor Philae ended up bouncing around and landing under a dark cliff overhang, unable to deploy its solar panels and complete its tasks. But let it not be said that Philae failed to leave its mark. Because it did. Quite literally.

To extract value from Philae’s accidental adventure, researchers have worked hard to identify the spots where the craft impacted the surface of the comet. This required painstaking analysis of Philae’s motion sensors to reconstruct its trajectory, along with a terrifically complex game of “one of these things is not like the others” played with before-and-after images of the comet’s jumbled surface.

The site of the initial bounce was easy enough to find, but the path from there to its resting place was another story. A new study led by the European Space Agency’s Laurence O’Rourke reveals another spot where Philae dented comet 67P. And the size of that dent actually tells us something remarkable about what comets are like.

Enlarge / Jack Black, "classic Hollywood liberal," on January 22, 2017 in Park City, Utah. (credit: Getty | John Parra)

Democratic House lawmakers have had no luck getting the Department of Health and Human Services to hand over information on its $250 million advertising campaign to “defeat despair and inspire hope” amid the devastating coronavirus pandemic.

But, the lawmakers have been able to collect documents from the federal contractors working on the campaign—and the details in those documents are “extremely troubling,” they say.

In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the lawmakers revealed some of those details, which show blatant political partisanship. For instance, A-list celebrities considered for pandemic-related public service announcements were individually rated based on their loyalty to Trump and other political leanings. Of the 274 celebrities reviewed, only 10 made the cut. The rest were rejected, including Jack Black, who was dubbed a “classic Hollywood liberal” and Judd Apatow, who, the documents say, “believes Trump does not have the intellectual capacity to run as President.”