Corporate News
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Tesla Killed the Solar Roof and Its Certified Installers Are Eating the Loss
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home,
Tesla stopped selling the Solar Roof in August. There was no event, no blog post, no farewell video. Certified installers were told Tesla would supply conventional solar panels going forward, and the Solar Roof page on Tesla's site now sends you to those panels instead.
Elon Musk once said Tesla would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week by 2019 or 2020. The real total came to roughly 3,000 systems over about seven years, something like 95% short of that pace.
Advertisement
OpenAI Is Pulling Its Models Out of Cursor, and Musk Is the Reason It Gives
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
If you open Cursor every morning with an OpenAI model selected in the picker, you have until November 12 to choose something else. OpenAI is winding down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor, and the reason has nothing to do with Cursor's code or its bill.
OpenAI laid it out in its own post on August 28: "Today, we notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026." Cursor now belongs to SpaceX, which also owns xAI. Both answer to Elon Musk, and OpenAI would rather not hand him the keys.
John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Editorial,
Apple's leadership page changed today. John Ternus is listed as CEO, Tim Cook has moved to executive chair with a seat on the board, and the board section now carries headshots instead of a plain list of names. Apple also rewrote the bio under Ternus's photo. Day one came with no keynote and no memo to the troops. It came with a webpage, and somebody at Apple picked every word on it.
The longest paragraph in that bio skips past iPad, AirPods, and the run of iPhones he shepherded through hardware engineering. It's about things not breaking. "John has led much of the company's focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient," it reads, before listing a recycled aluminum compound now used across multiple product lines, the 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and "advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products."
Click to continue reading John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.
Sony Tells a Judge That Thinking You Own Your PlayStation Games Is Unreasonable
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
You've clicked a button that says Buy. On the PlayStation Store it says Buy Now, then Confirm Purchase, and then the money leaves your account and the game shows up in your library. Sony's lawyers have now told a federal judge that if you walked away from that thinking you bought something, your understanding wasn't a reasonable one.
That's the argument in a motion Sony filed on August 21 in Heycock v. Sony Corporation of America, the proposed class action over PlayStation Store checkout language now in front of Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. Sony's filing says "reasonable consumers would not be misled" into believing they own the digital games they buy, and that its checkout already does what California law asks, because you agree to the license terms before the purchase goes through. The Software Product License Agreement puts it flatly: "The software is licensed to you, not sold."
Apple Says an Ex-Engineer Took Circuit Schematics to OpenAI, Then Tried to Erase the Trail
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Apple's trade secrets fight with OpenAI now has a name attached to it. In an amended complaint filed August 31, Apple accuses Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer who left for OpenAI, of downloading dozens of confidential Apple files after he'd already started the new job. Circuit schematics among them, Apple says.
Then it gets worse for Liu, at least in Apple's telling. Apple claims that once he found out about the internal investigation, he directed an OpenAI coworker to "restore" Apple-issued devices, which Apple reads as an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. All of this is an allegation in an active lawsuit. Nothing has been proven, and OpenAI denies it.
John Ternus Becomes Apple CEO Tomorrow With Nine Days Until the iPhone Event
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,
Today is Tim Cook's last day as CEO of Apple. Tomorrow the job belongs to John Ternus, and nine days after that he has to walk onto a stage and sell you an iPhone. That is the entire honeymoon.
Apple announced the handover back in April, so the date is not a surprise. The placement of it still is. Apple chose to swap chief executives in the week before its biggest launch of the year, which makes Ternus's first public act as CEO the September 9 keynote, an event Apple is calling "Surprise and Shine." Most companies give a new boss a quiet quarter. Ternus gets a countdown.
Phil Schiller Leaving Apple, Handing Off the App Store on Tim Cook’s Last Day
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,
Watch any Apple keynote from the last twenty years and you were watching Phil Schiller's work. Follow any App Store fight of the last ten and you were watching him take the punches. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports he has stepped back from both jobs.
Per that report, Schiller has given up running the App Store and overseeing Apple's product events. He stays at the company as an Apple Fellow, working on projects nobody has described publicly. Apple has not announced any of it: no press release, no memo, no comment. Executive changes at Apple normally show up with a scripted quote attached.
Xbox Says Project Helix Is a ‘Family of Devices.’ The Rest Is Still a Guess.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Microsoft, Video Games,
Every console generation starts with a word you're supposed to read a lot into. This time the word is "family."
Speaking to the BBC at gamescom, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said the company has "been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Helix, and we'll share more soon." Project Helix is the code name for whatever follows the Series X and Series S. Sharma didn't say how many devices are in that family, what any of them are, or when you could buy one.
The US Is Reportedly Drafting a Rule to Stop China Renting the AI Chips It Can’t Buy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
American export controls on AI chips have always had a hole in them shaped like the cloud. You cannot ship an Nvidia Blackwell server to Beijing. You can, apparently, sit in Beijing and rent time on one that is racked in Bangkok. A new report says the Trump administration is finally writing a rule about that.
The Information reported this week that the Commerce Department is working on export controls aimed at Chinese companies' remote access to advanced AI compute in countries that do not have matching restrictions, with Thailand and Singapore named as the obvious examples. Per that reporting, Commerce could circulate the draft to industry trade groups for feedback as early as September. Every word of that is in the conditional. What exists is a draft described by sources. No rule has been proposed, published, or enforced, and the administration has not announced one.
Apple TV Now Costs $14.99 a Month, and the Annual Plan Took the Bigger Hit
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Home Entertainment,
The annual plan is where this one bites. Apple raised US prices for its Apple TV streaming service today: $14.99 a month, up from $12.99, and $119 a year, up from $99. The monthly bill went up about 15%, and the yearly one went up 20%.
Apple didn't send a press release. Its Apple TV page now lists $14.99 a month after a seven-day trial, and points to Apple One "starting at $21.95," which confirms the Individual bundle went up two dollars as well, and Apple's own marketing pages don't list a yearly price at all.
Click to continue reading Apple TV Now Costs $14.99 a Month, and the Annual Plan Took the Bigger Hit