Month: February 2022

Enlarge / The Pixel 6. (credit: Google)

Hot off the announcement that Google is seeing record sales for the Pixel 6, the company is expanding the distribution of its flagship smartphone ever so slightly. The Google Store is now selling the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro in Italy and Spain, taking the total Pixel 6 country distribution from nine countries to 11.

Google’s vice president of Devices & Services for EMEA, Michiel van Eldik, is quoted in the Google Italy Blog post saying (via translation): “Due to the high demand for Pixel 6 devices, coupled with global supply chain issues, we will launch a limited amount of devices and expect to sell them quickly.” Italy and Spain are only getting the 128GB versions of both phones, and they come in any color you want, as long as it’s black. In other countries, the Pixel 6 or 6 Pro phone is available in white, green, yellow, and red, with 256GB and 512GB storage options, but that’s all being limited due to supply problems.

When the Pixel 6 debuted in October, Google told Ars the phone was launching in “12 countries, including US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, UK, Germany, France, and Ireland on October 28th and then Spain, Italy, and Singapore early next year.” Assuming Google’s plans haven’t changed, Singapore is the only country on that list where the Pixel 6 hasn’t launched yet.

Enlarge / A worker picks up trash in front of the new logo in front of Meta’s headquarters on October 28, 2021, in Menlo Park, Calif. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

If last year was bad for Meta, this year might be worse.

The company’s earnings call last night painted a dismal picture. Its flagship Facebook platform lost about a million daily active users last quarter, the first time that has happened. Instagram and WhatsApp may still be growing but not by much—last quarter, the company added just 10 million users across all its apps. Meta lost $10 billion on its Reality Labs division, which handles VR and AR, the stuff it has been betting its future on. And the company said that it expects Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature to slash the coming year’s revenue by $10 billion, or about 10 percent.

The market did not react kindly to the news. Meta’s stock has taken a massive hit and is currently trading down around 24 percent below yesterday’s close, wiping around $200 billion off its market cap.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches on a pillar of fire in January 2022. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX has been launching Falcon 9 rockets thick and fast of late. With 10 launches since the beginning of December, the company has flown rockets at a rate greater than one mission a week. And another launch could happen as soon as today, shortly after noon (18:13 UTC), with a Starlink satellite launch planned from Florida.

Lost amid the flurry of activity are some pretty significant milestones for the Falcon 9 rocket, which made its debut a little more than a decade ago.

Number of launches

The Falcon 9 rocket has now launched a total of 139 times. Of those, one mission failed, the launch of an International Space Station supply mission for NASA, in June 2015. Not included in this launch tally is the pre-flight failure of a Falcon 9 rocket and its Amos-6 satellite during a static fire test in September 2016.

Enlarge / South Korean safety researchers discovered a bug that can prevent a Tesla’s seatbelt chimes from chiming. (credit: Getty Images)

Tesla has issued a new recall this week. On Tuesday it notified the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that some new Models S and X, as well as potentially any Models 3 or Y, might not sound the required chimes if the vehicle starts and the driver is not buckled up. The problem affects 817,143 vehicles and will be fixed by a software update.

Federal motor vehicle safety standards require that our cars make an annoying noise if they are started by a driver who is not wearing a seat belt.

However, according to the NHTSA Part 573 Safety Recall Report, if “the chime was interrupted in the preceding drive cycle and the seat belt was not buckled subsequent to that interruption (e.g., the driver exited the vehicle in the preceding drive cycle while the chime was active and later returned to the vehicle, creating a new drive cycle),” then the chime won’t sound.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Starting on March 29, Google is changing its infamous “Web & App Activity” controls for paid users of Google Workspace. That feature is now being split up into two settings, one still called “Web & App Activity” and another called “Search history.” The big news is that Google is taking advantage of this settings split to re-enable some tracking features, even if users have previously opted out.

Google has started emailing Workspace administrators about the change (thanks, Hacker News), and a support page gives some details about what’s going on. Both the email and support page are incredibly confusing—even Google’s own employees have a hard time parsing Google’s privacy controls—but we’ll try to shed some light on the situation.

The support page begins, “Starting March 29, 2022, the Web & App Activity Admin console setting is going away.” “Web & App Activity” is one of the two main Google privacy settings (along with “Location History”) that saves everything you do on your Google account. You might remember these settings from several lawsuits about how confusing and poorly labeled they were. Leaving these settings on means that features like autocomplete work better, but it also means that Google gets to keep all your activity.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS.

IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as “shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments).”

In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management.