The Daily Crunch 10/28/16 MacBook Pro port problems, Facebook can't stop cloning and Amazon hits a rare sour note with Wall Street. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for October 28, 2016. And bad news: you still have to drive your own car a little while longer. 1. Apple once again pushing for a single port future with new MacBook Pros These days, it sometimes seems like all Apple does anymore by way of updates is kill ports many people love. The new MacBook Pro design replaces all ports (save the 3.5mm stereo jack, somewhat ironically) with Thunderbolt 3, which uses the USB-C physical design spec. People are predictably moaning. I'll just say that even as a big fan of my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro and its various ports, I'm upgrading to the new version and am more excited than put out by the new Thunderbolt 3 spec's amazing capabilities in terms of video, power and data transfer. Even positive change is never easy, but particularly not when it involves dongles. Plus, Touch Bar looks cool for anyone who edits any kind of audio/visual media. 2. Really Facebook, how many days in a row is one of these going to be about you copying Snapchat? Because I feel like I just did one yesterday. And this is getting ridiculous. Maybe MySpace would still be around if it had copied Facebook this aggressively when that feud was going on but it's a bad look regardless. 3. Soylent sickness spreads to the main product Soylent is trying to get to the bottom of its Soylent Bar snafu, which saw some consumers get very sick from eating them. Turns out a very small percentage of customers were also getting sick from eating the most recent iteration of Soylent powder, also known as Powder 1.6. Hey maybe if your food has version numbers and bugs you're doing something wrong with your life. Just saying. 4. Amazon's earnings were not good Amazon had a miss on its most recent quarterly earnings, leading to its stock price dropping. They missed mostly on EPS and it's not like Amazon to have a quarter like this, especially in recent years. Alexa and the Echo line have been a bright spot, however, so maybe that'll be a cost now (they're selling them so cheap) that turns into a big benefit later. 5. But Bezos is still spending on eternal life Maybe Jeff just wants more time to make up for this bad quarter: The Amazon founder has invested along with the Mayo Clinic in a startup that's fighting aging with medicines aimed at helping you shed older cells in order to make room for vibrant new ones. 6. Self-driving car startup fizzles Original iPhone hacker George "geohot" Hotz was going to build a $999 add-on that gave existing cars autonomous highway driving capabilities – was being the key word. After receiving a letter from the NHTSA asking reasonably that the company prove its product was safe before releasing it on U.S. roadways, Hotz folded and shut down production of the Comma One. Investors for the company include Andreessen Horowitz, and I can't imagine they're pleased with this rash move. 7. Google's making a big bet on Canada Google is hosting a startup event today – in Canada, of all places. The event takes place in Toronto (my neck of the woods, for observant readers) today and is interesting because the focus is specifically on startups and tech talent in the U.S.'s northern neighbor. Or "neighbour," as we say. Google has been investing more engineering resources into the Waterloo region, and that's bound to be good for the startup economy it says is second in the world in terms of number of companies when compared to Silicon Valley. |
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