Father’s Day is coming up soon! While we’ve handpicked eighteen great gifts for the dad-ly figure in your life, we’ve also worked with our friends at TechBargains to find great deals on other gift-worthy gadgets that we adore. Does your traveling dad need a compact iPad? We’ve got you covered! Or does he want the best robot vacuum that can be had for love or money? We’ve got you there, too. Happy shopping!
$200 Off The Best Robot Vacuum Ever
The iRobot Roomba 980 is our favorite robot vacuum. It’s fast and effective; it has iRobot’s Dirt Detect system, and a rubber roller that doesn’t collect fuzz nuggets. It’s also unbelievably expensive, and never on sale, except now.
Google Pixelbook for $749 (was $999). Does your dad need a light, powerful, versatile computer that’s barely bigger than an iPad Pro? He’ll enjoy tippity-tapping away at Google’s visionary Pixelbook, which doubles as a tablet or a laptop and can be used with a keyboard or a stylus.
Apple iPad Mini 4 for $300 (was $400). The iPad Mini 4 is Apple’s only 8-inch iPad. Its compact size and 128GB of storage make it perfect for downloading movies and taking on long trips.
Ultimate Ears Megaboom for $120 (was $250). All of UE’s portable Bluetooth speakers are appealingly candy-colored, durable, and pack a lot of sound for the money. This is still one of our favorite speakers, and now it’s more than half off.
When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.
Walking into the new art exhibit centered around augmented reality and virtual reality storytelling, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the alternate dimensions that had been built.
The exhibit, Festival of the Impossible, is showing at Minnesota Street Project galleries in San Francisco, California, through this weekend. The show features new works by artists breaking boundaries in these relatively new digital mediums.
Learning that the artists were given these VR and AR platforms to stage their concepts made me believe the creations were meant to show off the hardware and software innovations, and to demonstrate the potential of the new tech. After experiencing each artists’ work, however, I realized the creations were not just technology demos, but that they gave the artists a chance to express their own ingenuity with technology in a way that’s never been this easy, nor this real.
Step Inside
Each artist in the exhibit gets their own open space where the audience can wander into their imagination. Some artists told stories on iPads using augmented reality, with the screen showing the view through the camera transformed, in one case, to show the room on fire or drenched in rain.
In another artist’s space, I pointed the iPad’s camera at small, 3-D printed beds. The view in AR showed Sims-like figures sleeping with their realistic dreams playing out above them. Some dreamed of giant spiders; others, the nightmare of a computer that won’t stop buffering.
Some of the artists made their work more personal. Judit Navratil used AR to revisit her childhood home through a video that incorporated her deepest memories, including talks with her grandmother. With just about every installation, it would have been easy (and fascinating) to spend way too much time exploring every detail.
New World, New Tools
Every time a new technological medium comes along, the art world asks: How can we use this for storytelling? The art world will adapt to these new mediums, but someone has to test the waters first.
That’s where Adobe comes in. Just this week, Adobe, in partnership with Apple and Pixar, launched the augmented reality authoring tool Project Aero. This new piece of multi-platform software is intended to let designers and developers create AR experiences in a simple, standardized environment. Project Aero integrates with tools with which creators are already familiar, such as Adobe Photoshop CC and the 3-D design tool Adobe Dimension CC. Project Aero aims to give people of different backgrounds and disciplines the freedoms to bring others into their worlds through AR, telling stories and presenting ideas in a fresh way.
Adobe is a sponsor of Festival of the Impossible, and the event coincides with the launch of the new software and with Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which happened this week in San Jose, California.
For many of us, clean, drinkable water comes right out of the tap. But for billions it’s not that simple, and all over the world researchers are looking into ways to fix that. Today brings work from Berkeley, where a team is working on a water-harvesting apparatus that requires no power and can produce water even in the dry air of the desert. Hey, if a cactus can do it, why can’t we?
The secret isn’t some clever solar concentrator or low-friction fan — it’s all about the materials. Yaghi is a chemist, and has created what’s called a metal-organic framework, or MOF, that’s eager both to absorb and release water.
It’s essentially a powder made of tiny crystals in which water molecules get caught as the temperature decreases. Then, when the temperature increases again, the water is released into the air again.
They put together a box about two feet per side with a layer of MOF on top that sits exposed to the air. Every night the temperature drops and the humidity rises, and water is trapped inside the MOF; in the morning, the sun’s heat drives the water from the powder, and it condenses on the box’s sides, kept cool by a sort of hat. The result of a night’s work: 3 ounces of water per pound of MOF used.
That’s not much more than a few sips, but improvements are already on the way. Currently the MOF uses zicronium, but an aluminum-based MOF, already being tested in the lab, will cost 99 percent less and produce twice as much water.
With the new powder and a handful of boxes, a person’s drinking needs are met without using any power or consumable material. Add a mechanism that harvests and stores the water and you’ve got yourself an off-grid potable water solution.
“There is nothing like this,” Yaghi explained in a Berkeley news release. “It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. The aluminum MOF is making this practical for water production, because it is cheap.”
He says there are already commercial products in development. More tests, with mechanical improvements and including the new MOF, are planned for the hottest months of the summer.
Apple’s annual developers conference was this week, so naturally, our podcast conversation this week had to be about Tim Cook’s new Memoji.
Not really: We talked about all the things we can expect to see when iOS 12 comes to iPhones this fall, why Apple decided to launch “digital wellness” features, how walkie-talkie on the Apple Watch could make it more useful, and what iOS apps on Mac mean. Will Apple ever make a touchscreen laptop? Right now, the company says no…but it has a history of saying “no” before it goes and makes that exact thing.
Some notes: You can read all about the top news announcements out of WWDC here. Also, Arielle (who is on vacation the next two weeks) wrote about the paradox of Apple’s “screen time” efforts, while Lauren had the exclusive interview with Apple software chief Craig Federighi about how iOS apps will port to the Mac. Also mentioned in this podcast was the new Sonos Beam; check out our deep dive into the product’s development.
Recommendations this week: We didn’t have time to talk about smart speakers nearly as much as we wanted to this week, but we still had music on the brain: Mike’s recommendation this week is LIVE Quadrophonic, a 180-gram vinyl pressing of Suzanne Ciani’s 30-minute live electronic music performance. (Mike warns that it’s both abstract, and totally worth it.) Lauren thanks you in advance for indulging her in her shamelessly promotional recommendation of her brother Gerald’s new album, Rocket Ship.
Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Lauren Goode is @laurengoode, and Michael Calore is @snackfight, and Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Play Music app just by tapping here. You can also download an app like Pocket Casts or Radio Public, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
We’re also on Soundcloud, and every episode gets posted to wired.com as soon as it’s released. If you still can’t figure it out, or there’s another platform you use that we’re not on, let us know.
The Stanford Laptop Orchestra meets to rehearse every Wednesday night in the spring from 7:30 to 10:30 pm (The late hours are a remnant of Wang’s night-owl habits as a graduate student.) It’s a for-credit course at Stanford—Music 128, cross-listed in the computer science department as CS 170—but getting in isn’t easy. The group of 15 students includes those with computer science credentials, and those with more traditional music backgrounds, but neither is enough to become a great laptop orchestra player. The most important thing is curiosity. “We’re unified by this interest to make music together with computers,” says Wang, “and to figure out what that means.”
Wang likes to call SLOrk a kitchen of sound. “We can go to a restaurant, order delicious food, and enjoy that,” he says. “But there’s a special joy in going back into the kitchen with raw ingredients and being able to concoct your own dish. The process of making—and eating—your own creation carries with it its own satisfaction.”
Every orchestra member gets a MacBook, propped up on an Ikea breakfast tray, with a meditation pillow beside it.
In the ten years that SLOrk has existed, it’s composed over 200 original works and created almost as many new instruments. Most of these works have little in common, but they all start with the same set-up: Every orchestra member gets a MacBook, propped up on an Ikea breakfast tray, with a meditation pillow beside it. The laptop connects to a homespun hemispherical speaker, made by adding car speaker drivers and high-efficiency amplifiers to Ikea salad bowls. (From far away, they look a bit like Minions.) Wang created the speakers during the first year of SLOrk, with an aim to add an acoustic element to an otherwise machine-heavy ensemble. “We want the computer instruments to seem more like acoustic instruments where the sound isn’t coming from a PA system around you but from the artifact itself,” he says. While the MacBooks and cables have been replaced a few times, the hemispherical speakers are the same ones SLOrk used ten years ago.
Every station also includes a GameTrak, a game controller with a retractable cable. GameTraks were originally used in golf simulation video games, where they could turn someone’s virtual golf swing into data points. It was a commercial flop, but computer music researchers immediately saw the appeal. “We bought no less than 100 of them at massively discounted prices,” says Wang.
The Stanford Laptop Orchestra uses a range of noise-makers, from game controllers and physical instruments to, yes, laptops.
Ge Wang
Kimberly Juarez-Rico gets tuneful.
Ge Wang
The device maps movement in three-dimensional space. For a laptop orchestra, that means turning fluid movement into sound value. “It opens up the infinite space of human music, and the dancelike qualities of musical performance,” says Matt Wright, a longtime SLOrkian and one of the orchestra’s instructors. “You can put one in someone’s hands and say, ‘Here. Make an instrument out of this.'”
In past performances the ensemble has used GameTraks to operate video-games that translate into melodic compositions, or finger-plucked the cable like a traditional string instrument. One composition in SLOrk’s upcoming show introduces a new instrument, created by hanging GameTraks upside down on a beam and weighting them with various wooden blocks. Performers push them like swings on a playground to create the song. The performance is wildly playful, like watching kids on a playground discover the delightful sounds of their own laughter for the first time.
One student used a face-tracking program called FaceOSC to turn facial movements into sound.
During the SLOrk term, each student creates their own instruments, composes their own scores, and performs them with the class. There are virtually no rules, other than the limits of imagination and programmability. One student, Kunwoo Kim, used a face-tracking program called FaceOSC to turn facial movements into sound. He and fellow SLOrk member Avery Bick stared into their laptop web cams while opening their eyes wide, or raising their eyebrows, or stretching their mouth to scream, to control the pitch and tempo of the face-tracking instrument.
“Using a face as a controller was a very interesting concept for us,” he says. “We wanted to deliver a human message that uses human parameters.”
Kim came to Stanford after earning a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering. He joined CCRMA because he wanted an interdisciplinary program that would let him continue engineering while also studying music; when he heard about SLOrk, he figured he’d give it a shot.
“I had no idea what was going on,” he says about his first day in the orchestra.
Soon, though, things started to click—and Kim found something in SLOrk that he’d never found before in his engineering coursework. The point of SLOrk isn’t to have a direction. It’s to find a direction.
“The engineering that I have been doing was about solving problems,” says Kim. “But in SLOrk, there’s no problem to solve. We try to cover more of the sentimental side of human beings. And I think that’s very interesting. You’re actually trying to say something about humanity through the computers.”
The FIFA World Cup is the biggest event for the most popular sport in the entire world. According to FIFA and Kantar Media, almost half of all people who are alive tuned in at home to watch at least a minute of one match of 2014’s World Cup in Brazil. Over one billion people watched the final game.
The 2018 World Cup will take place in Russia, and many of the matches will be easy to watch in the United States (if you live on the east coast, at least). Here’s our guide to catching as many of the beautiful games as possible.
What Is It, Anyway?
The World Cup is a soccer tournament where national teams compete for the world title. Each country that qualifies to participate is organized into different groups, which ascend through brackets by winning matches. This starts on June 14 and goes for a month, with the final on Sunday, July 15. This year, the United States failed to qualify, as did Italy, the Netherlands, and Chile.
But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of drama. For example, the tiny nation of Iceland is making its World Cup debut—and against none other than the team led by superstar Lionel Messi, playing for his final chance to bring the Copa del Mundo back home to Argentina. Suspense!
When Does the World Cup Start?
The first match is between Russia and Saudi Arabia on Thursday, June 14 and takes place in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. Kickoff is at 11 am EST (8 am PST).
Russia is an enormous country, and matches will take place in far-flung stadiums in Sochi, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg, among others. If you want to watch a particular team, look up their group schedule. Find the match schedule, which channels are streaming which match, and input calendar reminders here, or find scores on FIFA’s website.
During the group stage, matches will be taking place between 6 am EST (3 am PST) and 3 pm EST (noon PST). Some of the early match-ups that you might want to make room for on your schedule include:
Iceland’s debut against Argentina on Saturday, June 16 at 9 am EST (6 am EST)
Germany, the returning champs, facing off against Mexico on Sunday, June 17 at 11 am EST (8 am PST)
England’s fearless and unbelievably young striker Marcus Rashford in the first game against Tunisia on Monday, June 18 at 2 pm EST (11 am EST).
If you live on the west coast, you’d better have a DVR. Or you may have to resign yourself to watching a few game highlights after the fact, since only deranged people will drag themselves out of bed to watch France vs Australia at 3 am PST.
What Streaming Service Do I Use?
For English speakers in the United States, Fox Sports has exclusive broadcasting rights and will be showing every game. If your soccer-viewing would feel incomplete without an announcer yelling “GOOOOOOOL!”, Telemundo and NBC Universo have your back.
First, you need a streaming service that shows these channels. DirecTV Now might be the easiest and cheapest one. The “Live a Little” bundle includes both FS1 and Telemundo, and right now the company is offering a free 7-day trial period, or $25 off for the first three months. (It will go up to $35 after that). DirecTV Now also offers an app for iOS and Android devices, and you can stream the games online at DirecTVNow.com.
If you’re not interested in the Spanish-language games, SlingTV carries Fox Sports and FS1 in the Sling Blue package. Sling is also currently offering a free 7-day trial period. If you think you might want to stick with a streaming service after the World Cup, Sling Blue offers 45+ channels and is cheaper than DirecTV at $25 per month. Sling also makes apps for iOS and Android devices.
You might also want to consider FuboTV. Its base package offers 85 channels for $45 month and includes FS1 and Universo. There are iOS and Android apps too. More services to consider: YouTubeTV carries Fox Sports, FS1, and Universo for $40 per month; Hulu Live TV, which carries the Fox channels for $40 per month; and Playstation Vue, which carries FS1 for $40 per month.
If you really don’t want to pay anyone any money, you can wait until July to use one of the 7-day free trials to stream the final game for free.
What Device Do I Use?
After you subscribe to one of these services, log in to the Fox Sports app on your streaming device. We love the Roku Ultra, but Amazon’s Fire TV and Apple TV also support these services. If you don’t immediately see the game you were looking for, don’t panic. Check the schedule, since some games will be streaming on a different Fox channel. All of the games should be available on FoxSports.com and the Fox Sports GO app.
If you decide to stream from your phone, it will be easier to watch on your television with a $35 Google Chromecast. True cheapskates—and I salute you—will avoid paying for any service whatsoever with a digital antenna, like this one, which will let you watch Fox games over the air.
You also don’t have to watch all the games to enjoy the experience of the World Cup. There will be endless articles, recaps, and analysis. Our personal recommendation for podcasts is Al Jazeera’s Game of Our Lives, which examines soccer through the various lenses of politics, economics, and cinema, with guests like Werner Herzog.
Finally, I have one last suggestion: Check to see if your local bars, restaurants, or movie theaters are planning on playing games during business hours. If there’s anything more fun than watching soccer, it’s watching soccer with fifty of your new best friends, while drinking beer at 11 am. Just a thought.
Update 10:00 am June 8, 2018: Fox Sports will also be partnering with LiveLike to offer a streaming VR experience through their Fox Sports VR app (available for iOS and Android devices). Watch the games in a virtual in-stadium suite, and switch on social VR to “sit” with either your Facebook friends or viewing partners picked at random (you can also switch this feature off). Users will also have access to pre-produced 360-degree features and watch previously-recorded tournament moments.
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Personal computers have not elicited many thrills of late. They’ve gotten cheaper, sure, and a little faster. But despite some wild promises the gap between the actual and the possible has remained expansive. This week, it narrowed significantly.
PCs that work on smartphone parts. Devices that run all day, but for real this time. A 32-core hellbeast processor. The first GPU shrunk down to a 7nm process. Always-connected 5G laptops. And while not a PC, the ASUS ROG put vapor cooling in gaming-focused smartphone. (Vapor cooling. In a smartphone.) This was the bounty of Computex, the Taiwan trade show that serves as the cradle of innovation for what goes inside your gear.
Not all of these innovations will wind up in consumer-facing devices, at least not for a while. Not all of them are strictly necessary for the majority of the computer-using masses. But if you’ve grown tired of waiting for the future to become the present, this week, the industry pressed the fast-forward button.
Souped Up
Let’s start with the near-term, and work outward from there. Qualcomm, for years the king of (non-iPhone) mobile processors, set up shop in Windows PCs last December, pushing the convergence Google has already pushed heavily in its Chromebook line. The premise: all the productivity of a laptop, with the battery life and connectivity of a smartphone.
That first effort used a Snapdragon 835 chip, the same you’ll find top-tier smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8. Its successor, the Snapdragon 850, is strictly for laptops. You still won’t want to edit video on a so-called Always Connected PC, and it’s not going to do you any favors playing PUBG. But it’s a new enough platform that the gains between each generation are potentially transformative, rather than iterative. The Snapdragon 850 promises a 30 percent systemwide performance jump over the 835, triple the AI performance, and up to 25 hours of continuous-use battery life.
Keep your grains of salt handy, especially over battery life claims, which are notoriously juiced industry-wide. But by optimizing for Windows 10 specifically, the 850 potentially gives PC makers the key to a viable everything machine, feather-light laptops that work anywhere, any time, for as long as you need it to. And they’re coming this year.
“It’s a big deal. The future of all notebooks is going to be like this,” says Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy. “They’re always going to be connected, and you’re truly going to be able to use them the entire day, regardless of what you’re doing, without having to bring a power cord with you.”
If connectivity and efficiency don’t rev your engine, fear not: AMD has you covered. Its Threadripper CPU line may sound like it was named after a dainty Victorian serial killer, but its next-generation release includes a variant that packs in 32 cores and 64 threads. For the uninitiated: That is very, very many cores and threads. Contextually, Intel made a huge splash last May—with a chipset that had half as many.
“Particularly in workloads like video editing, doubling the amount of cores is almost linear. What would have taken you a half an hour to edit or recode a 4K or 8K video now takes 15 minutes,” says Moorhead. “Workstations, creative-type applications. Any type of rendering is where you’ll see the real-world benefits. Wherever you see the hourglass today.”
In fact, think of Threadripper 2 the way you might a tricked-out auto-show reveal, there more to demonstrate what’s possible than for you to actually buy. (To be clear, you can buy it, sometime in the next few months, for a yet-unspecified price.) But it’s got plenty of appeal, even on possibility alone.
“In the past, I’ve built my own PCs from various components. I would seek out the best processor, the best GPU I could get. A 32-core PC processor sounds like really cool stuff to me,” says Shane Rau, who leads semiconductor research at IDC. Rau cautions that his enthusiasm isn’t an endorsement, especially given that Threadripper 2’s actual performance remains to be seen.
Still, it’s progress! Real, near-term progress. And that’s before you even get to what’s coming a little further out on the horizon.
Far and Away
The most directly impactful development out of Computex this year may ultimately come from Intel. It had chip announcements both whimsical—the limited edition Core i7-8086K is Intel’s fastest yet, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the x86 chip architecture that redefined personal computing—and aggressive, teasing a CPU with 28 cores. But look, instead, at Intel’s purported display breakthrough, which claims to halve the amount of battery used by a laptop screen.
“Being able to tackle what is one of the big power consumption aspects on your average laptop or mobile device, the technology pieces that Intel’s put into doing some very dramatic power reduction in display is I think going to have the biggest near-term impact,” says Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research.
Intel Low Power Display Technology is classic trade show sizzle, promise of performance without much detail to back it up. It comes in the form of a 1-watt display, manufactured in partnership with Sharp and Innolux, and Intel pegs the overall battery life gains at up to eight hours. That’s about as much information as you’ll get for now; an Intel spokesperson described it as more of a prototype than a ready product. But let that temper your expectations, not deplete them. Your screen is a battery-sucking vampire. How wonderful that someone’s even attempting to fashion such a sharp stake.
(Let it be noted here that Intel also showed off a dual-display, clamshell computer this week, in case you’re into that sort of thing. It gets demoted to a parenthetical because of how many manufacturers have tried and spectacularly failed to make that work over the last five or six years. But godspeed!)
And then there’s arguably the real star of the show, an AMD prototype of the first-ever GPU built on a 7nm process. Unlike some of the other blockbuster announcements out of Taipei this week, this one won’t make its way to your computer any time soon. It’ll find a home in data centers, helping AI and machine learning compute at blistering speeds, using a lot less energy to do so.
That means the gains won’t be as flashy or as visible as those from other corners. It’s still a big honking deal. “The jump from 12nm to 7nm is going to be significant,” says Hanselman. “7nm means that they ought to be able to save on significant power savings in terms of compute capacity. It’s a big potential step.”
It’s big, too, that AMD is the the company that took it. After years of lagging behind, it’s now throwing down some gauntlets of its own.
“We’re back to this familiar sense of competition,” says IDC’s Rau. “These companies are producing better and faster, more cost-competitive products that I think bode well for the PC.”
And perhaps more importantly, for those who buy them, whether they need an all-day, always connected device or a hair-singeing powerhouse. It’s too early to know what they next generation of PCs will look like, or how they’ll incorporate all these new toys. But at least on the inside, they’re already brimming with potential.
SAN FRANCISCO – Walk down the street on garbage day in many towns, and evidence of our love affair with online shopping is plain to see. Recycling bins overflow with boxes from Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others.
All those folded and flattened corrugated cardboard boxes are a testament to Americans’ diligent recycling efforts — to a degree.
A USA TODAY analysis of several industry studies on cardboard use and recycling paint a different picture.Americans are sending more corrugated cardboard to the landfill than to recycling plants compared to past years.
Online sales have surged in the past five years, and cardboard use jumped 8% in the same period, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. Yet cardboard recycling has dropped.
Last year, 300,000 fewer tons of corrugated containers were recycled in the USA than in the year before, even as domestic consumption increased 3.5%, according to the AF&PA.
Without enough cardboard sent to recycling centers to be used to create new boxes, manufacturers may need more timber. Recycled content and timber each make up about half of what’s in a corrugated box.
“We need those boxes to come back. The alternative is trees,” said Bill Moore of Moore & Associates, a paper recycling industry consultant in Atlanta.
From the box-store baler to your curb
For all our efforts to flatten, pile and stuff boxes into recycling bins, consumers aren’t that good at recycling cardboard. For years, they didn’t have to be.
Many of the cardboard shipping boxes used to go to retail stores. Workers at your local Kmart, Sears or Target would load the flattened boxes into a machine that bound them into bales that the stores could resell for $74 or more a ton. Groceries and big-box stores recycled 90% to 100% of their cardboard, Moore estimated.
“Grocery and retail stores have been fantastic partners for us,” said Rachel Kenyon, vice president of the Fibre Box Association.
Consumers aren’t as efficient at it. About 40% of Americans either don’t have access to or don’t sign up for curbside recycling, said Betsy Dorn, director of RSE USA, a sustainable-packaging consulting firm in Orlando.
Of those who do, few actually recycle all their cardboard, mostly because it’s a hassle. The city of Charlotte asks residents to tear or cut cardboard into small pieces that fit loosely into recycling carts and tells people not to fold it.
Nationally, consumers send back 25% of their cardboard for reuse, Dorn estimated. “If you have to cut your cardboard up because it’s too big, who’s going to do that?” she said.
“China has stopped buying, and the recyclers in the United States can’t find enough buyers, so some of that goes to landfill. And that’s not eco-friendly at all,” said Hannah Zhao, a senior economist who follows global recovered-paper markets for RISI, a forestry and paper products consulting firm based in Bedford, Mass.
Garbage companies are just beginning to react.
In San Francisco, the waste management company Recology is giving customers new 64-gallon bins to replace the 32-gallon containers because of the increased volume of cardboard. Regular garbage cans shrank by half, to 16 gallons.
Last year, the company raised rates 14%, in part to deal with the rapid shift in what residents lug to the curb. Counties in Oregon and Michigan, along with El Paso, Largo, Fla., and Attleboro, Mass., have considered rate increases.
Even in the new, bigger bins, the cardboard doesn’t always fit, a common discouragement to household recycling.
Children’s book author Emma Bland Smith said she tries to keep mail and online orders at a minimum to keep down waste. Even so, she sometimes has to store paper for a week to wait for space in her recycling bin.
Her block has worked out an informal space-sharing arrangement. “We have an understanding with neighbors that you can use someone else’s bin if theirs is not full,” she said.
Online shopping’s ripple effect
Cardboard box recycling took a turn for the worse during the holiday shopping season in 2016. Usually, waste paper collection centers are flooded with cardboard after Christmas. In January 2017, they didn’t get more. They got less.
That period was a turning point for retail America, when the explosion in online shopping spurred by Amazon’s free two-day shipping for Prime members and aggressive strategies by rivals such as Walmart and Target set off wave after wave of retail store closures. Shuttered J.C. Penneys, Sears and Kmarts meant those stores stopped recycling cardboard boxes, which were in the hands of households.
Online retailers are dealing with the problem. Ten years ago, Amazon introduced 100% recyclable packing, so products can ship in their original packaging and don’t need to be put in a second box for shipping. That reduced the number of boxes by 500 million over the decade.
Walmart increased its number of box sizes from 11 to 27, to use the least amount of cardboard to get something to the customer.
Those moves haven’t help improve recycling rates. The problem is expected to become more urgent. E-commerce will make up 25% of all retail sales by 2025, according to ABI Research, suggesting even more boxes could go from doorstep to trash.
In the short term, recycling industry experts said, manufacturers could change the production process, for example, by going to dedicated production lines that supply e-tailers only in the Amazon ready-to-ship mode. This reduces the double-boxing problem.
“It’s just a question of how long does it take to correct and for the markets to adjust to the new reality that e-commerce is here to stay,” said Kenneth Waghorne, a packaging analyst with RISI.
Bridget O’Neill of San Francisco said she tries to forgo the recycling bin entirely when possible, in part because Amazon uses paper packing tape to seal its boxes. That allows her to put that cardboard to the greenest of uses.
“I can flatten those boxes and put them in with my compost,” she said.
Amazon first started shipping video streaming devices four years ago. Since then, the company has updated its Fire TV products to match the larger trends of consumer gadgetry. The flat Fire TV boxes were shrunk down to HDMI sticks and dongles that weren’t much larger than a thumb drive; to this day, the cheap streaming sticks from Amazon and Roku are best-sellers for both companies. Then Amazon’s TV devices started working with voice control, a trend that Amazon itself is largely responsible for, considering the popularity of Alexa.
Whereas earlier Fire TV devices required you to summon Alexa through the remote, the Fire TV Cube has Alexa built in.
Now Amazon is launching what it thinks is the next obvious thing in home entertainment. The just-announced 4K Fire TV Cube is part Fire TV, part Amazon Echo, and part TV control center for the other boxes and gadgets you have crowded around your TV. Whereas earlier Fire TV devices required you to summon Alexa through the remote, the Fire TV Cube has Alexa built in. In fact, Amazon says the whole user experience of the Cube was designed with a “voice first” philosophy.
“The goal for the Fire TV Cube is to really enable voice experience in a way that makes sense and actually highlights the use of voice,” says Sandeep Gupta, vice president of product development for Amazon Fire TV. “It’s not about just making some stuff that’s voice enabled.” What Gupta didn’t say, because he didn’t need to, is that putting Alexa in every possible space in your home is part of Amazon’s larger strategy of getting you to use Amazon’s services, and getting you to buy even more stuff from Amazon.
Eight microphones on the top provide access to Alexa. There’s also a dedicated button for switching them off.
Amazon
At $119, the new 4K Fire TV Cube is the most expensive Fire TV device to date. It’s also easily one of the nicest-looking TV products Amazon has ever made, compared with the flat-sandwich design of its Fire TV boxes and the uninspiring Fire TV Stick. This is for good reason—since it has Alexa built in, it’s meant to live out in the open, and not hide inside a home theater console. But even with the Fire TV Cube being sold at a reduced price ($90) for the first couple of days, it veers away from Amazon’s strictly utilitarian approach to making and selling inexpensive hardware.
The Amazon Fire TV Cube has eight far-field microphones built in, an array that was designed to accommodate the shape of the cube. It has the same beam-forming, noise-reducing, and echo-cancelling tech found in other Echo products. In his initial demo of the Cube at Amazon’s Silicon Valley labs last week, Gupta staged a scenario where he had just gotten home from work: “Alexa, I’m home,” he said to the Cube, and the Samsung TV, Sony soundbar, and Philips Hue smart lights in the room all turned on.
The Alexa features work pretty much as you’d expect; you can ask the Cube for the weather, or for jokes, or access any number of skills, Amazon’s term for voice-powered apps. It’s that connection to the TV or soundbar that’s new. The Cube connects to the TV via HDMI and supports both multi-directional IR and CEC, a feature that allows users to control multiple HDMI-connected devices with just one remote. (Sonos supports CEC in just-announced, Alexa-equipped Beam soundbar as well.) This all means that you can use Alexa to control a whole host of TV interactions, from toggling the power to searching for shows to controlling the volume. You can even use it to switch inputs between TV boxes and consoles, arguably one of the most useful parts of the setup.
Cube owners with set-top boxes for cable TV or over-the-air TV can connect Amazon’s box to those devices and access them using Alexa. These commands have to be super specific—”Alexa, switch to channel 31,” for example. You can’t just search for a program or movie by name and expect Amazon to surface the cable TV option for you. (Roku, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors in this space, now shows over-the-air TV search results in its “smart guide.”)
Still, voice commands provide a new way to switch between internet streaming video and old-school cable. And, like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV products support single sign-on via certain apps, which means you can sign in to your cable TV provider’s app and be automatically signed in to any other supporting apps.
One HDMI port is on the back, along with a USB port. There’s also a plug for an IR extender if you want to hide the Cube in a cabinet.
Amazon
The most interesting part about the new Fire TV Cube is almost certainly its interface. While the Cube runs on FireOS, Amazon’s Android-based operating system for tablets and TV streaming devices, it has the UX of the Echo Show. Gupta says Amazon used the Echo Show, its odd display-centric gadget, as drafting practice for the Fire TV Cube. “The reason why we’ve tried to leverage Echo Show is because voice interaction is different from TV remote interaction,” he says. “So, the results and the catalog are the same as any Fire TV, but it’s presented in a way that can be navigated through voice.”
This includes a grid-like format, with clearly numbered content options presented. It prompts you to say things like, “Alexa, show more,” or “Alexa, select option four”—much cleaner than trying to burrow through thousands of video options with your voice. Once you pick up the Fire TV Cube remote and press a button, the interface immediately switches back to the “old” Fire TV format. The Fire TV Cube remote, by the way, also has Alexa built in, in case you’d like to turn the Cube’s microphones off but still want to use Alexa from time to time.
Amazon, not surprisingly, is pitching the Fire TV Cube as the perfect Frankengadget for your TV, something that not only gives you full Echo features but is supposed to drastically simplify your TV experience. But as with any hardware product from a company that has some services skin in the game, the Fire TV Cube is not a perfectly agnostic streaming platform.
Like every other FireOS device, the Fire TV Cube doesn’t play content purchased through iTunes. Apple TV, on the other hand, now streams Amazon Prime Video, so Apple has the distinct advantage there. More important is FireOS’s lack of a native YouTube app. Thanks to a spat that Google and Amazon can’t seem to resolve, your only option for watching YouTube videos on an Amazon device right now is to use a browser.
Also, don’t expect the Fire TV Cube to replace your soundbar. According to Amazon executives, the Cube’s audio output is comparable to what you get with an Echo Dot—so, not great. There’s also the question of whether the Cube will coexist nicely with other Echos in a small household; like if you have another Amazon product in your kitchen and that happens to be within spitting distance of your TV. Amazon says its Alexa devices are smart enough to discern which one you’re speaking to when two are nearby, but that isn’t always the case in the real world. For now, your best solution is probably to use different wake words.
First world problems aside (too many voice-controlled speakers!), Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube shows the company is serious about taking over your living room–or at the very least, becoming a very important part of it.
Coincidentally, the day that I brought home the electric Yuba Boda Boda bike was the day that the city of Portland decided to start a major construction project on the thoroughfare that goes by my house.
For a week, car commuters have been wandering around in a daze, finding their way through a maze of detours. “It’s like they’re a bunch of ants and their home has been destroyed,” our babysitter mused. I’ve bypassed all the confusion by e-biking to the construction site and walking my daughter and myself through the crosswalk.
Contrary to what my colleagues think (I love you guys!), I don’t believe that the bike revolution will happen when infrastructure improves. You see, I live in Portland, one of the most famously bike-friendly cities in the country. I’m (relatively) young, I don’t have a disability, and almost all of my destinations are less than a mile from my house, reachable through quiet residential roads.
Even armed with the best intentions, ideal circumstances, and gear, there are still some days when it’s just faster to pop my screaming toddler into a carseat than to get on my bike and do a SoulCycle-esque uphill sprint to her daycare. I don’t think people will take to biking en masse until it’s faster and easier to bike than it is to drive a car.
For the first time since I’ve become a mom, the electric Yuba Boda Boda has made that possible. It’s faster and easier to wheel the Boda Boda out of my garage, strap my toddler on the back, and e-bike, than it is to get in my car. The sound of my toddler shrieking, “This is so fun!” from the bike’s seat behind me is just a bonus.
Unlike the Yuba Supermarche, the electric Boda Boda is really easy to ride. It has a more compact aluminum frame with an extended rear rack, and comes in either a step-through or a step-over option. It has a 1.5-inch Chromoly fork, hydraulic disc brakes, and big, fat, 26-inch Cruz commuter tires. The tester model was in a wonderful bright teal color, and it was easy to adjust the seat and handlebars to fit my 5 foot, 2 inch height.
Yuba informed me that they don’t do home delivery, so I would have to pick up the bike myself at the retailer. I don’t own a vehicle big enough to fit the bike inside, and it wouldn’t fit on my roof rack. No matter, I said. I’d just ride it fifteen miles home.
Small Steps
The electric Boda Boda is kitted out with the e6000 Shimano Steps motor, which is an intelligent, weatherproof electric system with an integrated computer that assists you when you’re walking or riding the bike. It made the ride from the bike shop back to my house a total breeze.
The Steps system provides up to 50 newton meters of torque while pedaling. It automatically downshifts to a lower gear for an easier start, and even while stopping and starting on steep hills (curse you, stoplights!), I never felt like I had a hard time getting going.
Because the system provides power only when you need it, the motor has a colossal range of up to 93 miles, or around six hours, on one charge. That initial 15-mile bike ride on high assistance ate up only 24 percent of the battery life, even when I was hauling ass uphill at around 20 mph. If you ever want to surprise dedicated bike commuters, I suggest putting a Shimano Steps motor on the mom-liest bike of all time and waving as you pass them, hunched over in their racing crouches. I felt the way Paul Newman must have when he dropped a V8 engine in his tiny VW Bug.
The bike’s display is mounted between the handlebars, and you can turn your lights on and off, check your speed, range, gear, and battery life, and select between three levels of assistance (you can also turn off assistance entirely) from one convenient spot.
On a week of trucking my daughter and myself around our neighborhood (at much more moderate speeds), I only charged it once. It took a little over an hour to charge it after it had gone down to 40 percent.
E-assisted biking makes a huge difference, especially when you consider how heavy the whole apparatus is. The Boda Boda weighs 60 pounds without accessories, and can accommodate up to 220. I didn’t quite get there, but I came close. After you start piling on bags, bike seats, and kids, it is a lot of weight for a small woman to keep balanced. When it comes to hills, forget about it.
That’s why I normally hook a big, awkward bike trailer on my own bike, rather than put my kid in a bike seat. It’s a pain to wrestle my trailer out of my house and to strap my kids in it, but it does significantly lessen the possibility that I will keel over and crush everyone I love.
But, it’s much easier to maneuver a bike around obstacles when you don’t have a trailer fouling up your every move. My toddler far and away prefers riding in the open air, at a height where she can talk to me and enjoy the scenery. Instead of struggling to get her in the car, she now can’t wait to climb on. With electric assistance, I’m no longer afraid that I’ll let the bike topple over while she’s riding.
Big Boda Bucks
The electric Boda Boda is not light, or cheap. I wouldn’t be able to haul it up a flight of stairs if I lived in a walk-up, and the base model costs $3,400. A Kryptonite U-lock and cable seems sufficient protection for my ancient Surly, but I was terrified of letting the Boda Boda out of my sight. That might be a consideration if many of your bike trips are to public places like the farmer’s market or the corner store. You can also detach the battery from the motor and take it with you.
The base model comes with a double stand, chain guard, wheel skirt, fenders, and front and back LED lights, along with a two-year warranty on the frame and a one-year warranty on the motor. Thanks to Portland’s Clever Cycles, my step-through tester model was tricked out with a bike bell, padded seat, roll bars around the rear rack, and the Yepp Maxi child’s bicycle seat, which would have added about $500 to the cost.
Like I said, it costs a lot of money. But when you consider how much cars cost, and how much time and money it takes to maintain them, four grand starts to seem like a drop in the bucket.
According to a 2009 survey by the National Household Travel Survey, car trips of under a mile in the United States add up to ten billion miles per year. There have been more times than I’d like to admit when I’ve jumped in the car and driven a half-mile and back to get more milk. I’m constantly crunched for time and energy, and sometimes driving is just easier, until it’s not.
The electric Boda Boda turns driving into a relative hassle. While it might not be financially or physically possible for every family, it’s made a huge difference in how many times I use my car—just in a week! If it does turn out to be possible to buy our way out of climate change, then getting an e-bike might be a great start.
The Sonos Beam is a new $399 soundbar, but to Sonos, it’s a heck of a lot more than just a speaker that sits under your television. It’s a fabric-wrapped representation of how Sonos sees the future—one in which all the voice assistants from Apple and Google and Amazon can live next to one another. In this future, hip, urban millennial parents will use Beam not just for Netflixing and HBOing, but queuing up the soundtracks to their hip, urban lives and for controlling their hip, urban smart home. And they’ll do it all with spoken commands instead of an app or a remote.
Development on the Beam has been going on for more than two years (during which time the speaker was referred to internally as El Rey, Spanish for The King). And it’s being released at a critical time for Sonos: It’s been reported that the 16-year-old audio company will soon file to go public. Sonos has also just laid off almost 100 employees, or around 6 percent of its workforce. Patrick Spence, the company’s relatively new CEO, inherited a perception of the company—one rooted in reality—that it was slow to react to the Amazon Echo and slow to release new products in general. Sonos products are pricey, and the company has been feeling pressure from the low end of the smart speaker market.
The microphones on top are for talking to your preferred voice assistant.
Beth Holzer for Wired
But that’s not the end of the speaker market Sonos wants to play in, even if this new Beam costs significantly less than Sonos’ two previous soundbars and also works with Alexa. Spence sees things like the Amazon Echo Dot as “stepping stones” to higher-quality speakers. Sonos believes firmly that audio quality is its killer feature and that if you experience the sound of a Sonos speaker, you’ll be more inclined to buy into a whole multiroom Sonos system. Employees at the company talk about sound as though it’s as essential as air or as vital as basic nutrients, and they emphasize simplicity as a feature in a way that rivals only Apple.
“We think of sound as a material that you can actually interact with,” says Tad Toulis, Sonos’ VP of design, who called in on a videoconferencing system while I was visiting the company’s offices in Santa Barbara, California, last week. “We have this life force running through the system called sound, and that can be either music or television or podcasts and so forth.”
The challenge for Sonos now is to convince potential new customers that a soundbar like the Beam—a soundbar for TV, for music, for chatting with an AI—is the speaker they need as the sound centerpiece in their living rooms. And they need to convince these buyers to pick a $399 Beam instead of an inexpensive Echo, an Apple HomePod, or a Google Home.
High Bar
There’s no mistaking the Beam for anything other than a soundbar, but it’s much smaller than Sonos’ last two television-adjacent speakers, 2013’s Playbar and last year’s Playbase. The Sonos Beam measures 26 inches across, around 30 percent shorter than the Playbar. It’s also 60 percent smaller by volume and weighs just 6 pounds. If the Playbase and Playbar were speakers you probably only moved when you were dusting, the Beam is something you could transport to your friend’s party and it wouldn’t be a total nuisance to do so.
Aki Laine, industrial design manager for Sonos Beam, took me through a product demo in a room at Sonos’ office that shared the same aesthetic as one of Breather’s rent-a-spaces: not quite a living room, but striving for it. I sat on a comfortable couch; a surf print hung on the wall. Perched in front of a Sony television was a brand-new white Sonos Beam on an entertainment console. (The Beam also comes in black.)
It’s 2.7 inches tall, which from my vantage point on the couch meant that the soundbar creeped just above the Sony logo on the TV. Laine says the designers carefully considered the sizes and dimensions of all of the top-selling TV sets on the market to ensure the product would fit well into most setups. In this case, it doesn’t align perfectly with the bottom of the TV, but the Beam is still remarkably unobtrusive. Plenty of people mount their TVs on a wall anyway, and Beam can be stuck to a wall too.
Another sign of Sonos’ design obsessiveness can be found in the fabric that wraps around the speaker’s body. It starts out as a circular tube of knitted polyester, like a sock. Then it’s cut to an exact length, stretched over the grille, and bonded to the inside edges of the speaker. Look at a Beam and you won’t see a single seam.
Sonos also custom-designed the Beam’s drivers, which are shaped like ovals. “The most cost-effective way to do transducers is to make them round,” Laine said. “But because we didn’t want to block any of the TV, we’re limited by height. So in order to move more air and get more sound out of the product, we designed elliptical transducers.”
There’s also a newly designed microphone array in the Sonos Beam. The $199 Sonos One speaker also has a microphone array and works with Alexa, but the two speakers have distinctly different shapes, which means the microphones used for voice recognition and noise cancellation required a different approach.
Cross Talk
At the start of the demo, Laine summoned Amazon’s Alexa through the Sonos Beam and asked it to turn on the television. These TV-control capabilities from the Sonos Beam are new, since Sonos replaced the optical audio cable that was in the Playbar and Playbase with support for HDMI ARC, a newish home theater standard that allows components to work together more smoothly, send each other commands, and more easily shuttle digital surround-sound signals between connected components. That also means that Beam supports CEC, one of the features of the HDMI standard that lets you use just one remote control for all of the devices in your home theater—even if it’s your voice, like in the demo I got.
The main upside of switching to HDMI ARC and CEC, according to Sonos, is that it facilitates support for more standards and codecs and that it makes things simpler overall. For example, the Beam can now automatically recognize whatever remote you’re using. Not all TV sets support HDMI ARC, so Sonos will throw an HDMI-to-optical adapter into the box so you can still send digital sound to the Beam. Like many new standards these days, simplicity comes with dongles attached.
Heavy Presence
To get a sense of how the soundbar performs, Laine cycled through a few music tracks from Jordan Rakei, Radiohead, and Beck before eventually landing on a short clip from the film Arrival. It’s hard to make an in-depth judgment after just a few minutes of listening, but to the average ear, I think the Sonos Beam will sound fantastic. Audiophiles may pick up on the diminutive speaker’s subtle lack of bass, despite it having four full-range woofers and three passive radiators. But it sounds great despite the small size. The clip from Arrival, which included loud, ominous tones and whispery dialog, benefited the most from the soundbar—specifically from its center tweeter, which was designed to amplify dialog.
Later that same day, I briefly visited Sonos’ anechoic chamber, a giant concrete box of a room with a mesh suspension floor and foamy soundproofing wedges lining the walls. The Beam speaker sat in the center of the room, on a surface carved to be the exact same size as the bottom of the speaker. A thin metal arm covered in microphones arced above the Beam. It looked like the speaker was about to be interrogated. In fact, this chamber is where all of Sonos’ products are interrogated. Because of the lack of any audible reverberation or resonance, every word spoken inside an anechoic chamber sounds serious, almost profound. Someone made a joke about turning the lights off, and I’m glad they didn’t. One form of sensory deprivation was enough.
Motorola is in no mood to rock the boat. Motos are moving off shelves at a respectable pace in North America where phone buyers (especially those buying unlocked phones), are starting to recognize the company’s affordable, but very usable Android phones. The sixth Moto G was shown off earlier this spring, and now its time for the main attraction: the Moto Z3 Play.
The Z3 Play has a few new notable features, but it’s mostly the exact kind of upgrade you’d expect from last year’s Z2 Play. For you spec hounds, it has a Snapdragon 636 processor that Motorola says is about 30 percent faster than the Z2’s 626, an extra gigabyte of RAM (giving it a grand total of 4 GB), and the new Android Oreo (8.1). Battery life should remain around a day and file storage is still 32GB, though you can still upgrade it with a MicroSD card.
Can You Spot the Differences?
Spotting the design in phones is sometimes like examining a Where’s Waldo book, but there are some visible differences between the Z2 and Z3 Play. Motorola has added more microphones, two of which you’ll notice on the bottom of the phone’s face. They’ll let you talk to Google Assistant and Alexa from far away, and help cancel noise out when you’re talking on the phone. The rear of the phone is also covered in Gorilla Glass, though aluminum still adorns the edges.
It also did away with its front-facing fingerprint sensor in favor of new positioning on the right side. I haven’t held the phone yet, but this side positioning worked decently well on older Sony Xperia phones that used it.
The Power Pack battery Mod will come bundled with the Moto Z3 Play.
Motorola
The reason that fingerprint sensor had to move is simple: Motorola wanted more screen space, but didn’t want to make its phone bigger. The display now stretches 6 full inches diagonal, with slightly more pixels than before (2,160 x 1,080). Competing phones pack more pixels these days, but the HD AMOLED screen on last year’s Z2 looked plenty beautiful and clear. It’s a good bet that the Z3 Play will, too.
To appease fans of its handy fingerprint sensor gestures on previous Z phones, Moto has crafted an on-screen gesture slider on the bottom of the screen that will let pro users save some real estate. There’s also an odd feature that lets you animate parts of your photos and save them as .gif files for maximum meme-ability. In the demo we saw, the feature wasn’t enthralling, but we’re hoping it will work better in the real world. Regardless, the 12-megapixel rear camera does have some minor upgrades from last year and the selfie cam has gotten a boost from 5 to 8 megapixels. Google Lens also replaces some of Moto’s similar image-recognition features in the camera app.
There’s still no headphone jack on the Z3, though Motorola will include an adapter in the box. It’s also not waterproof, just splashproof, but Moto reps assured me it should be able to handle an accidental toilet drop, if that’s your chief worry.
A Mod Monopoly
Motorola isn’t giving up on its Moto Mods. The useful modular magnetic snap-on accessories that previous Z phones have built their names around are still supported and may be pushed harder than ever with new bundles. You can browse the Moto Mods here, but to give you an idea, there are Mods that add a zoom camera, a projector, let you talk to Alexa, or even print pictures. Most helpful of all are the extra battery packs, which can boost your battery capacity when you slap them on.
The Moto Z3 Play will start with a $500 price tag and come with a Moto Power Pack Mod included. It’ll be available unlocked, ready to work on any of the four major U.S. wireless carriers when it ships later in the summer.
Most of the best Memorial Day tech sales have slowly trickled to an end, but with summer in full swing and new products coming out all the time, there are a surprising number of killer deals this week, including a rare sale on some excellent Google gadgets. With the help of our friends at TechBargains, below are some of our favorite deals going on this week.
Google Device Deals
Google discounts some of its products now and then, but this week four of them have had their prices slashed. The Google Pixelbook is the most powerful Chromebook you can buy, by a longshot, and ChromeOS has improved considerably since we reviewed it late last year.
With the Google Home Mini on sale, rival Amazon has put its competing Echo Dots on discount, along with the Echo Show, which is an Echo with a screen, perfect for your kitchen.
Be sure to check out some of the other killer audio deals this week, including the BackBeat Pro 2, Sony noise cancelling headphones, and UE Megaboom. We’ve also included a TV and laptop that we like.
15.6-Inch Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Laptop for $480 (Was $760) – Use the coupon code “EXTRA270NOW” at checkout for the discount. Has an Intel Core i5 (7th Gen) CPU, 8GB RAM, Windows 10 Pro, 256GB SSD
When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.
Steve Jobs changed the world with the iPhone, the glossy slab of aluminum and glass that redefined the category of “phone” the day it went on sale in 2007. But it wasn’t until a year later, when Jobs introduced the App Store, that Apple would make its most lasting contribution.
The App Store invented a new world, where chauffeurs, dates, and deliverymen could be summoned with a few taps; but also where our attention could be shattered, our democracy shaken, and our anxiety spiked. Ten years later, as we increasingly grapple with technology’s dominance over our minds, it’s hard not to imagine Steve Jobs as a young Dr. Frankenstein; the App Store, his monstrous creation.
“iPhone and iPad are some of the most powerful tools ever created,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, while speaking at Apple’s annual developer conference this week. But our apps “beg us to use our phone when we really should be occupying ourselves with something else. They send us flurries of notifications trying to draw us in for fear of missing out. We may not even recognize how distracted we’ve become.”
Now, Apple—like much of Silicon Valley—wants to cure the disease it’s caused. The next version of iOS will be armed with a “comprehensive set of built-in features” to limit distractions and recalibrate priorities on the iPhone. There’s a more expansive Do Not Disturb mode, which flips on during bedtime and hides notifications from the homescreen until you’re fully awake and ready to face them. Do Not Disturb can also be switched on during certain times of day, switching off when you leave a particular location or when an event ends on your calendar. A new feature for “tuning” notifications lets you adjust how you receive the pop-ups from certain apps, and for the first time, Apple will support grouped notifications to make them easier to parse and manage.
There’s also a dashboard for usage insights, called Screen Time, which sends a weekly breakdown of how you spend your time on the iPhone. A built-in App Timer can set limits on certain apps, reminding you to move on after 30 minutes or an hour. Those features also update Parental Controls, which first came to the iPhone in 2008, by letting parents to monitor their kids’ activity and set limits on how they’re spending their time. Throughout many of these features, Siri is there to help, like a secretary that holds your calls during important meetings and knows exactly how you take your coffee.
The new features earned Apple generous applause on Monday, a sign that the WWDC crowd appreciated the company taking responsibility for the iPhone’s absorbent qualities. But just moments later, Apple executives demonstrated Memoji, a new personalized emoji feature that involves staring at the screen and animating a digital character with your facial features. Another demo featured Julz Arney, who works on Apple’s fitness technologies, biking while breathlessly scrolling through productivity apps on her Apple Watch, changing dinner reservations, texting friends, browsing the web, checking notifications about her infant baby, and struggling to close the fitness rings on the watch’s face.
The cognitive dissonance was striking. Apple says it wants you to have a healthier relationship with your phone, and it’ll even give you the tools to do it. But for every feature it showed to wrangle notifications or curb app use, it added more to keep you staring at your screen. The Screen Time dashboard and Do Not Disturb mode might make it easier to ignore certain apps, or shame you into spending less time thumbing through Instagram. But the rest of the keynote showed that Apple isn’t ready for you to put your iPhone down just yet.
Time Well Spent
The rise of “digital wellness” has been coursing through Silicon Valley for years, but it reached its fever pitch earlier this year when Tristan Harris, the father of the “time well spent” movement, formed the Center for Humane Technology. The group evangelizes a more human approach to personal tech, calling for better tools from the big tech companies, regulation from government, and a greater awareness of how much of our lives we waste staring at screens. Facebook name-checked “time well spent”—Harris’s famous credo—when it rejiggered its News Feed algorithm in January. Google riffed on the idea last month, when it introduced new Android features to promote “JOMO,” or the joy of missing out. It was Apple’s turn to go next.
In many ways, Apple was already primed to join the “digital wellness” movement. The company stands for minimalism; a distraction-free interface fits well with the Apple ethos. It makes most of its money from hardware, not software—meaning as long as long as you buy the iPhone, it shouldn’t matter how much time you spend staring into the black hole of its screen. Apple even introduced the Apple Watch with this idea in mind: it was pitched as a device to free you from the tyranny of the phone.
“We’re in a very unique position because we have never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of hours that you use it,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said today in an interview with NPR. (Apple declined to give an on-the-record interview for this story.) “The user is our focus. And so our question is always, what is in their best interest?”
And yet, Apple’s native apps seem to be creeping in the opposite direction. Memoji was just one of the new immersive features demoed Monday. The native Photo app in iOS will get more social, popping up suggestions to share photos with friends; iMessage and FaceTime will get a suite of camera effects that look more like Snapchat. The problems with smartphone obsession have nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with apps—ones like Instagram, and Facebook, and Snapchat. Apple seems to want you to spend more time interacting with your iPhone, with native experiences that look more like those apps. It’s hard to claim that any of these updates constitute “time well spent.”
In Apple’s view, users should make their own choices about how they use their phones. If you want to stare at your Apple Watch throughout your workout, or spend the next hour animating the poop emoji with your face, so be it. Apple’s “digital wellness” features are less paternalistic than Google’s, designed to empower you to make the choices you think are healthy without much interference. The limits on the App Timer can be easily extended; Do Not Disturb switched off with a tap. Screen Time simply shows you how you’re spending time on your iPhone, so that “you can make decisions about how much time you want to spend with your device each day,” as Federighi explained it on stage at WWDC.
“The fact Apple thinks three product changes alone can solve a complex social problem speaks to how simplistically they are treating the issue,” says Andrew Dunn, the CEO of Siempo, an Android app that replaces the standard homescreen with a simpler interface to minimize distraction. He and other developers have created their own solutions to smartphone obsession, ranging from apps that lock you out of your phone during certain times of day to ones that block all notifications. Dunn says that if Apple really wanted to give iPhone users a better “digital wellness” experience, the company should’ve turned to the community of developers who had already been building these tools for years. But yesterday, there was no mention of easing the current restrictions and allowing developers to build on the new screen time features.
“This is certainly a start in providing options to stem tech addiction and obsession, but nothing on your phone is going to change that behavior until you change the psychology behind it,” says Larry Rosen, the co-author of The Distracted Mind and a research psychologist who studies the impact of technology. Giving users the tools to monitor their own behavior is great, but showing people how much time they’re wasting on Facebook doesn’t make Facebook any less addictive. Hiding someone’s notifications can’t cure FOMO, and adding interactive Memojis doesn’t encourage people to spend any less time staring at their iPhones.
Apple’s new features represent a useful acknowledgement of the problems with technology. The screen time tools go a long way to giving users more control, and many iPhone users will be thrilled to finally find the features they’ve been wanting for years. But new features can only be as successful as the apps they regulate—and in Apple’s case, just like Frankenstein’s monster, it might already be too late.
Want to understand all the most important tech stats and trends? Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants. Check out the full report below.
Industry veterans will recall a time when these once popular publications heralded the new “world wide web” as the technology of the moment. Alas, they were gone in the relative blink of an eye once the internet went mainstream — casualties of technology ubiquity.
The latest tech trend of the moment, “cloud computing,” has reached a similar maturity, says a new report published this week by CompTIA. The report, “2018 Trends in Cloud Computing,” chronicles just how mainstream cloud computing has gone, says report author Seth Robinson, senior director for technology analysis at CompTIA.
“Our report finds that cloud has transitioned from an emerging technology that people are trying to figure out to an established one that is now a staple of computing infrastructure, applications and more,” Robinson says.
From a practical standpoint, the maturity means that basic migrations are done. Ditto for simple cost-benefit analyses and SaaS experimentations. Practically everyone’s mail is now in the cloud, their data storage, backup and recovery, too. With experiments behind them, end customers are trying figure out how best to deploy, leverage and secure their hybrid architectures that increasingly have cloud technology underpinning them.
Seth Robinson
“In the early stages of cloud, we were really doing the same old IT on a new model. What the later stages of cloud are about is doing a new form of IT. It’s that simple,” Robinson says.
Consider the study findings that leads Robinson to this conclusion:
Ninety-one percent of firms are using cloud computing in some form.
Six in 10 companies have more than 40 percent of their IT architecture in the cloud.
Three-quarters of businesses have between one and five years of experience with cloud solutions.
The findings are in line with similar study results from various parts of the world. Take Scandinavia, where a 2017 report conducted by Radar on behalf of Tieto and VMware found that more than 80 percent of all organizations in Finland, Norway and Sweden are using cloud services to some degree. “The Benefits of Cloud Maturity” report concludes that “organizations displaying the highest levels of cloud maturity are better prepared for the impact of future change.”
Robinson concurs. His study finds that cloud computing has become a critical part of IT operations. It also chronicles how cloud has become the key driver in decision making and infrastructure planning, and why its difficulties or challenges are more than outweighed by the business benefits that the technology provides. Take emerging technology, for example.
According to the CompTIA study, 81 percent of respondents say that cloud has “greatly enhanced or moderately enhanced their efforts around automation.” It literally has become the surest path for embracing new technology such as AI, virtual reality, blockchain, IoT and more.
The potential upside for IT solution providers? They could be more valuable to customers, says Robinson.
“Think about the complexity now that exists in technology. You have some things on-prem. You have some apps in the cloud. There are private and public capabilities. Channel companies have to juggle more variables and complexity than ever before. Customers simply cannot do it, so by default their trusted services providers become more valuable if they can demonstrate all the many ways they are helping.”
The latter point is an important distinction. CompTIA says a significant percentage of end customers have a direct-first mentality when it comes to the cloud. What this means is simple: When interested in a new technology, end customers tend to go directly to a vendor’s website to give it a try. While many eventually turn over the management and securitization of cloud technologies to a third-party business partner, the “try-it-first yourself” mentality represents a major shift in technology delivery and decision making.
As a consequence, channel companies, be they tech influencers, digital marketers, managed service providers, IT consultants or VARs, must zero in on the distinct value they provide, Robinson says.
“This isn’t so much about integrating an application, reselling it or even providing managed services on top of it,” he says. “It’s more about embracing a future state in which multicloud environments are pervasive, and end customers are more focused on optimizing their technology and using it more strategically. This is a very different form of value than in the previous generation in which distribution, reselling and managed services carried more value than they do today.”
Excited to announce that this year’s The Europas Unconference & Awards is shaping up! Our half day Unconference kicks off on 3 July, 2018 at The Brewery in the heart of London’s “Tech City” area, followed by our startup awards dinner and fantastic party and celebration of European startups!
The event is run in partnership with TechCrunch, the official media partner. Attendees, nominees and winners will get deep discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin, later this year.
The Europas Awards are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to the daytime is all the speakers and invited guests. There’s no “off-limits speaker room” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs and speakers.
What exactly is an Unconference? We’re dispensing with the lectures and going straight to the deep-dives, where you’ll get a front row seat with Europe’s leading investors, founders and thought leaders to discuss and debate the most urgent issues, challenges and opportunities. Up close and personal! And, crucially, a few feet away from handing over a business card. The Unconference is focused into zones including AI, Fintech, Mobility, Startups, Society, and Enterprise and Crypto / Blockchain.
We’ve confirmed 10 new speakers including:
Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital
Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp
Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures
Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures
Nancy Fechnay, Blockchain Technologist + Angel
George McDonaugh, KR1
Candice Lo, Blossom Capital
Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners
Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel
Tina Baker, Jag Shaw Baker
How To Get Your Ticket For FREE
We’d love for you to ask your friends to join us at The Europas – and we’ve got a special way to thank you for sharing.
Your friend will enjoy a 15% discount off the price of their ticket with your code, and you’ll get 15% off the price of YOUR ticket.
That’s right, we will refund you 15% off the cost of your ticket automatically when your friend purchases a Europas ticket.
The Awards celebrates the most forward thinking and innovative tech & blockchain startups across over some 30+ categories.
Startups can apply for an award or be nominated by anyone, including our judges. It is free to enter or be nominated.
What is The Europas?
Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with 1,000 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.
• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers
• Key Founders and investors speaking; featured attendees invited to just network
• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A directly from the main stage
• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics
• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking
• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters
• A parallel Founders-only track geared towards fund-raising and hyper-networking
• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene
• All on one day to maximise your time in London. And it’s PROBABLY sunny!
That’s just the beginning. There’s more to come…
Interested in sponsoring the Europas or hosting a table at the awards? Or purchasing a table for 10 or 12 guest or a half table for 5 guests? Get in touch with:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard joined key execs from Apple and industrial manufacturers Alcoa and Rio Tinto to announce a new process for smelting aluminum that removes greenhouse gases from the equation.
Alcoa and Rio Tinto are creating a joint venture in based in Montreal called Elysis, to help mainstream the process, with plans to make it commercially available by 2024. Along with swapping carbon for oxygen as a byproduct of the production process, the technology is also expected to reduce costs by around 15 percent.
It’s easy to see why Apple jumped at investing into tech here, pumping $13 million CAD ($10 million USD) into the venture. The company has been making a big push over the past couple of years to reduce its carbon footprint across the board. This time last month, Apple announced that it had moved to 100-percent clean energy for its global facilitates.
“Apple is committed to advancing technologies that are good for the planet and help protect it for generations to come,” Tim Cook said in a release tied to today’s news. “We are proud to be part of this ambitious new project, and look forward to one day being able to use aluminum produced without direct greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacturing of our products.”
Those companies, along with the Governments of Canada and Quebec have combined to invest a full $188 million CAD in the forward looking tech. While the new business will be headquartered in Montreal, U.S. manufacturing will also get a piece of the pie. Alcoa has been smelting metal through the process at a smaller scale in a plant outside of Pittsburgh since 2009.
