Month: December 2021

Enlarge / A slightly grimy Hyundai Ioniq 5 on an unusually wet and gray day in Southern California. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The car I’ve been most excited about in 2021 is the Hyundai Ioniq 5. The Korean automaker has impressed with each new model we’ve tried, and its smaller electric vehicles are some of the few that can rival Tesla in terms of range efficiency.

The Ioniq 5 is the first product from Hyundai Motor Group—which includes Kia and Genesis—to use the new 800 V E-GMP platform, which was designed from the ground up to produce pure battery EVs. I spent a day driving one last week, but I can’t say more about that until later this week. What I can tell you, now that Hyundai has finalized pricing, is how much the Ioniq 5 will cost.

The cheapest way to get an Ioniq 5 will be the 125 kW (168 hp) rear-wheel drive SE Standard Range model with the smaller 58 kWh battery pack. This will cost $39,700 before the IRS 30D tax credit and any local incentives. However, as is nearly always the case with a new car regardless of OEM, if you want the cheapest one, you need to be prepared to wait, as it will only become available in spring 2022. (That is still an improvement over Hyundai’s original plan of not bringing the car to the US at all.)

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

If comedy equals tragedy plus time, this one is hilarious: Microsoft is now selling $25 “premium posters” to commemorate the “Red Ring of Death,” a systemic hardware failure in early Xbox 360 consoles that cost the company over $1 billion to fix.

It may be a funny story a decade and a half after the fact, but in mid-2007, the RRoD error was incredibly expensive and damaging for the then-young console and brand. Microsoft’s stopgap solution to the problem was a three-year warranty extension that was said to cost between $1.05 and $1.15 billion dollars (closer to $1.5 billion in today’s dollars). The red-ring error was caused by heat issues and “a badly designed graphics chip,” and it wasn’t fully addressed until late 2008, when a new console revision with a redesigned motherboard and cooler-running chips was released.

In an interview in 2015, then-Microsoft VP Peter Moore said that the warranty extension, while expensive, was a “Tylenol moment” that helped the company prevent irreparable damage to the Xbox brand. He also credited then-CEO Steve Ballmer with the decision to spend more than $1 billion to fix the problem—”I always remember $240 million of that was FedEx,” he said. “Their stock must have gone through the roof for the next two weeks.”

Enlarge (credit: Liu Guanguan/China News Service)

Thea-Mai Baumann had posted to Instagram using the @metaverse handle for nearly a decade when her account was disabled on November 2.

“Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else,” the app told her. 

Baumann wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, but the timing was curious. The account block came just days after Facebook had announced its new name, Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the name reflected the company’s new focus on its vision of the metaverse, a virtual world meant to facilitate commerce, communication, and more. Baumann’s @metaverse handle was suddenly a hot commodity.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As the world is beset by Log4Shell, arguably the most severe vulnerability ever, one of the biggest human resources solutions providers is reporting a ransomware attack that has taken its systems offline, possibly for the next several weeks. So far, the company isn’t saying if that critical vulnerability was the means hackers used to breach the systems.

The company said on Sunday that services using the Kronos Private Cloud had been unavailable for the past day, with the attack taking down Kronos’ UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, and Banking Scheduling Solutions services.

“At this time, we still do not have an estimated restoration time, and it is likely that the issue may require at least several days to resolve,” Kronos representative Leo Daley wrote. “We continue to recommend that our impacted customers evaluate alternative plans to process time and attendance data for payroll processing, to manage schedules, and to manage other related operations important to their organization.”