The impact of the Chinese coronavirus continues to ricochet around the world, with an increasing chance of hitting the global economy. Multiple Chinese industry segments have warned that earnings might be impacted by the illness.
Now, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said he expects the coronavirus to hit Apple iPhone shipments by as much as 10 percent due to decreased production caused by illness in China.
″Our latest survey indicates that the iPhone supply is being affected by the coronavirus and, therefore, we cut the iPhone shipment forecasts by 10 percent to 36-40 mn units in 1Q20,” Kuo said in a note on Sunday. Apple no longer reports how many iPhones it sells per quarter, but Kuo figures Q1 2019 shipments were about 38 million devices.
Apple had a massive Q4 to end out 2019, so it’ll head into 2020 in good shape no matter what. Tim Cook has already warned on the impact of coronavirus and he gave a fairly broad range for earnings, between $63B and $67B.
The impact of coronavirus on the world economy isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. Axios reports that Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Disney, Apple, JP Morgan, and Google have taken various steps to shut down operations, halt production, or banning employee travel. China took steps to shut down stock market trading for certain companies on Monday after early opens were sharply negative, according to ForeignPolicy.com. The BBC writes that China will pump $16B into its economy to help stabilize the situation and to ease investor fears about the long-term impact of coronavirus.
A coronavirus cross-section. Credit: Scientific Animations/CC BY-SA 4.0
Right now, thinking is split as far as how large the long-term risk is. Coronavirus is not particularly deadly, but it’s expected to have a larger impact on the Chinese economy than SARS did, partly because the economy is significantly larger now than it was then. MarketWatch says that compared with SARS:
‘[T]he Wuhan virus has hit ten years into a bull market for equities. With valuations no longer cheap, and in some cases a little stretched, investors are more likely to be looking for an excuse to sell rather than buy,’ Shearing wrote. ‘The potential for the virus to trigger a significant market correction is much greater now than it was back then.’
There have also been reports that existing antivirals and HIV drugs may be effective against this coronavirus, however, and the situation is still in the early days. Right now, it’s impossible to estimate how large or small the worldwide impact of the virus will be.
There is free energy raining down on Earth in the form of sunlight, but harnessing all of that energy has proven difficult. The sun only shines during the day, and those solar panels are useless at night, or at least they are right now. Researchers from the University of California Davis suggest you could generate power at night using “anti-solar panels.” Of course, it’s all so obvious when you think about it.
Researchers around the world are working to improve the efficiency of solar panels, which currently only capture a fraction of the total solar energy falling on them. Even high-efficiency solar panels are at a disadvantage compared with non-renewable energy because you can’t generate solar power at night. So, you need to capture enough during the day to store for usage when the sun isn’t shining. However, battery technology has been similarly slow to improve. The anti-solar panels described in the journal ACS Photonicscould fill the gap to supplement power generation at night when solar panels and batteries aren’t good enough.
Solar panels work because they’re cold compared with the sun, so they can absorb sunlight and convert it to energy. Space, and therefore the night sky, is cold. Therefore, you can point a warmer panel on Earth toward the sky to radiate energy outward as infrared light. That’s what the University of California team is proposing—it’s essentially a heat engine.
These devices don’t use the same technology as solar panels, although they’d probably look similar. Solar panels rely on photovoltaic cells that absorb photons to create electron-hole pairs across the semiconductor, generating a working voltage. A nighttime panel would use a thermoradiative cell to emit infrared radiation from the Earth into space to create electron-hole pairs.
The team estimates that thermoradiative cells would only be able to generate about a quarter as much power as a solar panel of the same area. That’s mainly a consequence of the lower energy of infrared light. Silicon is the current material of choice for solar panels as it’s good at capturing light in the visible wavelengths. It may be possible to boost the efficiency of thermoradiative cells by using materials that can better interact with longer wavelengths of light, for example, mercury alloys.
The University of California study is just an initial proposal for nighttime energy generation. The next step is to start building the devices to see how well they perform.
The Thwaites Glacier, in West Antarctica, is one of the glaciers considered most at-risk for collapse over the next century, earning it the nickname “doomsday glacier.” Scientists have been studying the glacier with increasing concern over the past decade and they’ve learned a great deal about the interaction between the glacier and the bedrock it sits on as a result. Unfortunately, most of what they’ve learned has been ominous — and today’s news is no exception.
In January, for the first time, scientists bored a hole in the Thwaites Glacier more than 600 meters deep. The goal was to measure what’s happening underneath the glacier at the grounding line — the point where the glacier shifts from resting on bedrock to resting on / in the water. Ice that’s already in the water doesn’t have much impact on sea level when it melts because the only thing that’s happening is a phase change from solid to liquid. Ice that’s formerly been landlocked, on the other hand, is a net addition to the system and has a corresponding impact on sea-level rise.
The rate of glacier melt isn’t just impacted by ambient air temperature or solar radiation. The interaction between warmer seawater and colder sea ice at the grounding line has a major impact. As warmer water pools underneath the glacier, it can hollow it out from beneath. Researchers found exactly this situation at Thwaites last year, when they discovered a cavern two-thirds the size of Manhattan and nearly a thousand feet tall underneath the glacier. Now they discovered that the water making contact with the glacier at the grounding line is more than two degrees warmer than the glacier itself. You’d expect the water to be a little warmer — after all, it’s in a liquid state — but this is a larger variance than expected.
The problem with this kind of melt is that it can drastically exacerbate how much of the glacier is exposed to warm water, as the image below illustrates:
When the glacier was thicker, the grounding line sat just below the bedrock hump shown. As the ice thinned, water flowed past it, penetrating much farther inland than it had previously. Finding warm water at the junction between ground and ice implies that this kind of change could be occurring underneath the glacier.
“The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise,” notes David Holland, director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
To measure this information, the team deployed Icefin, a submersible drone designed to gather information where no human could venture. The vehicle swam nearly two kilometers from the drill site, directly up to the iceberg’s grounding zone, to take its readings.
None of the gathered data indicates that the Thwaites Glacier has reached some critical melt point where the decline will suddenly begin to accelerate. But the terrain under glaciers is notoriously difficult to examine, given hundreds of meters of ice stacked on top of it. The Thwaites Glacier is already considered to have contributed about four percent of total sea-level rise since the beginning of the industrial era, but it’s not the most-vulnerable or fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica. That honor goes to the Pine Island glacier, which shows evidence of being in an even more precarious position, with the base of the glacier sitting on bedrock below sea level. This implies that there is no geological feature to prevent water from penetrating under the glacier and reaching to the depths of its base.
If you’re wondering how bedrock could be below sea level, I’d like to introduce you to a new cool thing our planet does: isostatic rebound. Ice is incredibly heavy, and the weight of carrying ice sheets can depress even a continent-sized slab of rock. As the ice sheets melt and it gets therapy, the continental craton becomes less depressed. You can see evidence for this effect at Bathurst Inlet in Nunavut:
Much of Antarctica’s rock is currently below sea level thanks to the weight of its glaciers, including apparently, Pine Island. We know that there are streams and rivers of water underneath glaciers, as well as subglacial lakes, like Lake Vostok. I doubt any of the scientists on the expedition were surprised to find such warm water underneath the glacier. But it’s an unwelcome sign of how fragile the Western Antarctic ice sheet could prove to be in the decades to come.
Top image: Cavity Camp on Thwaites Glacier. Credit: Ted Scambos
If you’re a fan of Apple products, today is your lucky day. There are deals currently available on several of Apple’s most popular products, including its laptop computers, iPads, and smartwatches.
Apple designed its high-end Macbook Pro with both a high-performance Intel Core i7 processor and a fast AMD GPU. This gives the system the power it needs to accelerate image processing and to run modern games. The system also has a 16-inch Retina display and an aluminum shell, giving it a premium look and feel. Right now you can get this system from Amazon marked down from $2,399.00 to $2,099.00.
Apple’s newest smartwatch will be the company’s first to feature an always-on display, which will remain illuminated and provide on-screen information for the entire time the watch remains on. Apple said that like last year’s model, the new Watch Series 5 will continue to offer up to 18 hours of battery life on a single charge. For a limited time, you can get one from Amazon marked down from $399.99 to $354.99 with a clickable coupon from Amazon.
If you’re looking for a small tablet for travel, Apple’s compact iPad Mini may be the right choice for you. This tablet measures just 7.9 inches diagonally, and it has plenty of performance for gaming and multitasking curtsy of the A12 Bionic processor embedded inside. Usually priced at $399.00, you can get this tablet now for $349.99 from Amazon.
Featured Deals
Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch 9th Gen Intel i7 6-Core 16″ Retina Display Laptop with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Radeon Pro 5300M for $2,099 at Amazon (list price $2399)
Amazon-owned Ring has come under fire in recent years for its lax approach to privacy and cooperation with police departments around the US. As 2020 dawns, the company has promised to re-emphasize its commitment to privacy, and it appears to be following through. The newest version of the Ring mobile app includes a “control center” that offers more control over what happens to your data, including the option to disable police video requests.
Ring got its start with doorbell cameras but has since expanded into other types of cameras and home security. Following the Amazon acquisition in 2018, Ring forged its first partnerships with police departments. Ring offers a “Neighbors” app where users can share video footage in the spirit of a neighborhood watch, but police departments working with Ring can also request video from community members. While Ring has said that police don’t get precise location information or user data, it has occasionally gone so far as to give police maps of active cameras.
The new Ring app doesn’t fundamentally change the way the company’s cameras work, but it should put some people’s minds at ease. The Control Center offers a quick overview of your security and privacy settings. For example, whether you have two-factor authentication enabled, how many devices are logged into your account, and the number of shared users. You can also un-share your camera feeds or log-out all devices from this interface. This should give people some recourse if they suspect someone may have hacked their camera.
The police controls are available under the “Community Control” section of the new settings. Up at the top, you can disable the video requests. Naturally, Ring suggests you leave them enabled. When police request video from an area, you still have the option of refusing. Disabling the requests altogether ensures you’ll never get those notifications.
Technically, disabling police requests won’t matter if you don’t live in a jurisdiction that works with Ring. There are somewhere north of 400 police departments that do, though. You can see nearby police departments that have access to Ring in the video requests section of the app. That’ll tell you whether disabling requests will do you any good.
The new Ring app is now available on Android and iOS. Ring also promises future improvements to the Control Center with more fine-tuned privacy options.
Super Bowls used to mean Tom Brady hoisting another trophy along with ads of polar bears drinking Coke on not-yet-melting polar ice caps, that and the Budweiser Clydesdales. Now the most memorable – sorry, memorably good – commercials are cars and tech. Car ads have always been part of the 54 Super Bowls, but in the dotcom boom years “tech ad” meant money frittered away. Remember Pets.com? Agillon? Epidemic.com? All goners. Maybe automakers did a better job because there really are differences among cars. And the tech guys have learned from the money-wasting days at the turn of the century.
Here are the best car and tech ads of Super Bowl 54 (that’s LIV for traditionalists) along with some that didn’t click quite as well, and the best non-tech ad. We’re linking to ads from places (mostly, automaker sites on YouTube) that don’t have ads in front of them because why should you pay (with your time) to see an advertisement in order to see an ad?
The Best Ads: Hyundai Sonata, Jeep Gladiator
Hyundai Sonata Smaht Pahk. Two car ads stood out. The Hyundai Sonata spot for Smaht Pahk was the winner because it was funny, it made fun of a socio-economic group you can always make fun (people from Boston, especially since New England departed the playoffs early), and most of all because it is going to sell Hyundai Sonatas. The Sonata is the most important new car of 2020 (see our review), it is the Extreme Tech Car of the Year, and it’s loaded with standard safety features, virtually all of which are on the base, $26,000 Sonata SE. The top-line Sonata Limited, $34,000, includes Remote Smart Parking Assist, now being called Smart Park. Hop out, press the keyfob, and the Sonata pahks itself at Hahvahd Yahd, and backs out when you return. If you have a narrow garage in Back Bay or Chahlston, you don’t have to squeeze in and out inside the garage.
Too many Super Bowl commercials are ad agency spitting matches using client money to prove who’s more clever, with less thought given to whether the ad sells the product. The “Smaht Pahk” ad will do just that: Get customers to consider Sonata, and realize a mainstream car includes important new technology.
Jeep / Groundhog Day. This is the other spot that rose above the rest. Bill Murray reprised the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, this time in a Jeep Gladiator, the truck of the year in several autowriter / magazine competitions. It’s funny, it’s nostalgic, and if you don’t know Jeep makes a pickup truck in Punk’n Metallic orange paint and the doors and top come off (you do it yourself), now you do.
The concept of Groundhog Day the movie is weatherman Bill Murray is caught in an endless time loop that restarts each day when he wakes at 6 am to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, and has to again cover Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It’s faithfully recreated in the ad, except no Andie McDowell this time. And to Jeep’s good fortune, the 2020 Super Bowl was played on Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. Appreciating this spot probably helped if you’re old enough to remember the movie from when it was in theaters. But if not, you should, since it’s in the National Film Registry for being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Amazon Before Alexa. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi ponder what life was like before Amazon Alexa. The spot borders on slapstick: An 1800s upper-class woman in the parlor tells the maid, “Alexxa, turn the temperature down, two degrees,” the maid takes a log off the fire, tosses it through the window to the sound of shattering glass and a man’s muffled scream. A man in an 1800s city asks the newsboy, “Alex, what’s today’s news?” and he responds, “It doesn’t matter. It’s all fake.” Then in a 1970s Oval Office scene, a Nixon-esque voice commands, “Alicia, remind me to delete those tapes.” In the next room, an admin says loudly, “Yes, Mister President,” then softly, “I ain’t deletin’ …”
Conservatives are probably fuming if they conclude the “fake news” line makes fun of rather than echoes the current administration (hmm, who runs Amazon?), and liberals find it fair recompense for sitting through a patriotism-heavy, pre-game show that did conclude with a touching moment when four 100-year-old World War II veterans took part in the pre-game coin toss, led by Charles McGee, a pilot with the Tuskegee Airman that battled both the Germans and racism.
Google / Loretta. An old man reminisces about his life with Loretta through old pictures Google calls up, along with a clip from their favorite movie, Casablanca. If there’s a “when they cry, they buy” ad, this is it. It’s going to make everybody wish their parents scanned or at least saved and ID’d their favorite photos for you to scan. Not in the commercial but important to know is that face recognition is getting so good – too good, in China – that the thing that used to hard to do, figuring out who that is in a 50-year-old photo, can now be done automagically.
Old Luxury (Going Away Party) / Genesis. Hyundai’s Genesis division rolled out its first SUV, the GV80, using young and hip Chrissy Teigen and John Legend as they make their escape from old people, oddly shaped dogs, and an old-world mansion into the GV80. From the staircase, she looks down and says, “To old luxury: You had a good run but now it’s time to choose you up a little bit … I give you young luxury.” Teigen then gestures to the open courtyard doors and points to the GV80 that – oops – hasn’t yet pulled up (“Where were you?” she asks driver Legend. “It was supposed to be a thing and you made it not a thing.”)
Never mind that Audi did essentially the same ad – “Old Luxury” (even the same name) – in a 2011 Super Bowl commercial. In this case, yuppie inmates inhabit a faux luxury prison (a mansion in LA) filled with affluent Boomers / Millennials. They unlock the cell bars and make their way toward a waiting car. A guard releases the dogs (showy hounds). When that doesn’t work, he’s ordered, “Hit ’em with the Kenny G,” and as Songbird plays, some refuse to leave while others do. Two escapees make it the courtyard, a Mercedes pulls up (you see the tri-star hood emblem) and one says, “Lancaster, no, it’s a trap,” and Lancaster replies, “Nonsense, my father owned one.”
But the theme works, and has for ages, going back at least to 1988 and “Not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Actually, it doesn’t always work. America’s oldest car brand, the brainchild of Barney Olds, was killed off in 2004.
The Other Car / Tech Ads
Porsche did a creditable job with “The Heist”: The Porsche Taycan EV sports car is spirited out of the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. Once the heist is discovered, the guards argue / squabble over who drives which museum Porsche to track down the Taycan. That gives the viewer a chance to appreciate Porsche’s storied history and possibly begin to realize the Taycan is a continuation of Porsche history, not a bunch of greenies gone mad. The voices were a bit muffled, especially if you were watching the game with noisy friends, and works much better played on a PC with closed captions running.
A Toyota Highlander ad showed the car does indeed have a lot of room as the driver – 20 years ago this would have been a soccer mom commercial – picks up various people in comic distress from various scenes, ending with her son.
A third Hyundai group (Hyundai, Genesis, Kia) ad was for the upcoming Kia Seltos but more about the inspirational story of Oakland Raiders rookie Josh Jacobs and hard times growing up. It left some people wonder what Seltos is. Answer: The same platform as the subcompact and well-established Hyundai Kona, a bit roomier inside, and shipping this quarter.
T-Mobile and Verizon touted 5G service, which is still a ways off. T-Mobile used Anthony Anderson’s real-life, sassy, talky mom. Verizon essentially said that without 5G, emergency responders won’t get their job done as well.
Microsoft, whose Surface tablets are universally used (mandated) by the NFL, told the story of Katie Sowers, an assistant coach of the San Francisco 49ers. It’s a true story of perseverance and success, but the story was already being told in the two-week run-up to the Big Game.
Audi had an eTron Sportback spot run late in the evening after the kids were in bed, so they missed Maisie Williams singing “Let It Go” from Frozen.
GMC touted the rebirth of the Hummer as an EV in an ad with LeBron James. The Hummer is a ways off, so maybe it was okay to be low-key and laid back. This was not a call to action for hand-raisers.
Scout, the golden retriever owned by Weathertech founder David MacNeil, had his cancer cured at the University of Wisconsin vet school. MacNeil took a 30-second spot lauding the Badger vets and encouraging donations. Wisconsin hasn’t gotten this much PR since this mentions by Wisconsin alum / Wall Street Journal sportswriter Jason Gay in his column. Nice touch – who doesn’t like retreivers? – and if MacNeil wants to spend six mil in hopes of getting at least that much in donations to Wisconsin, more power to him. Pets cure a lot of human ailments by being there for you.
Tom Brady made it to the Super Bowl (as one of the game’s 100 best players of the NFL’s 100 years) and also was a spokesmodel for a Hulu spot. Amazon promoted its drama Hunters. Quibi pushed its short video service that launches this spring (nothing more challenging than 10 minutes) and hopes you’ll start saying “I’ll be there in a Quibi.”
Best in Show (Non-Tech): Lil Nas X
The hands-down winner among non-tech or car ads was the Wild West dance moves showdown between Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott with Old Town Road playing in the background. (The guy strumming the guitar at the end was Billy Ray Cyrus.) Doritos footed the bill and reaped the rewards, as long as remembers remember it was Doritos and not Bud Light or Axe body wash. And yes, when Lil Nas rides off on a horse with cascading speakers, it pays homage to Sheriff Cleavon Little and the Gucci saddlebags in Blazing Saddles.
Fast and Furious 9: Everybody’s still trying to match Bullitt.
There also were ads that continued through the show, especially Tide Pods, the claim being that if you get a stain on your shirt before the game starts, you can much later wash – remember, wash, not eat detergent pods – and the stain comes out, at which point in the last ad, the guy gets his now-clean shirt stained again. There were plenty of ads for upcoming movies – Fast & Furious 9 (photo), Minions, Black Widow, No Time to Die – and the trailers’ special effects made people glad, or annoyed, they have surround sound speakers.
Fox ran a lot of promos for future programming, including one for the Daytona 500 where stock cars appeared to come onto and arc across the field. Conspiracy theorists will see hidden hands at work when a Super Bowl broadcast on Fox News (actually, Fox Sports, but don’t let facts get in the way) runs the Donald Trump commercial midway through the first period when everyone is watching and the Michael Bloomberg spot didn’t get airplay until late in the extended halftime. Fortunately, Kansas City and San Francisco made it close until the final minutes; three late Kansas City scores made for a 31-20 win. So most viewers stuck around all three hours of the game and J Lo / Shakira halftime.
A few ads got remade at the last minute to downplay or factor out death or helicopters (RIP, Kobe). So the death-and-resurrection of Mr. Peanut spot was pretty bland.
BlackBerry has struggled to find a place in the modern smartphone era, and it turned to TCL to do the heavy lifting a few years ago. TCL has manufactured devices like the KEYone and KEY2 under the BlackBerry brand, but there won’t be any more BlackBerry phones from TCL. The company just announced that its licensing agreement ends on August 31, 2020.
To understand how BlackBerry and TCL got to this point, you have to look at the first few product cycles after the iPhone launched. BlackBerry stubbornly stuck with its traditional feature set as the iPhone grew by leaps and bounds. The company tried its hand at touch-screen devices like the BlackBerry Storm, but that was a flop. The company chugged long, losing market share quarter after quarter until it had to abandon its custom BlackBerry OS.
BlackBerry’s initial switch to Android was an entirely in-house affair with devices like the Priv. The deal with TCL, announced in December 2016, took all the hardware development off BlackBerry’s plate. This partnership gave us the KEYOne, Motion, KEY2, and most recently the KEY2 LE. That may be the last BlackBerry-branded smartphone for a while, or possibly ever. As of August 31, TCL no longer has the rights to use BlackBerry’s name or technology. TCL certainly won’t be launching any new phones with just a few months left in the contract, but it will also have to end sales of the ones it already released.
TCL made this announcement on Twitter but hasn’t followed up with any of the replies asking for more information. Will Blackberry itself start making phones again? Will it partner with another manufacturer? We just don’t know. The only piece of good news is that TCL will continue offering software support for the devices it has released, although updates on TCL BlackBerry devices have never been stellar. The KEY2 is still on Android 8.1 Oreo, which is now two generations out-of-date.
Most of the BlackBerry devices from TCL had a physical keyboard with those perfectly beveled keys that made BlackBerry devices so desirable in the past. However, that came with a smaller display and a somewhat more awkward form factor for watching videos and taking photos. People have become accustomed to larger screens, and on-screen keyboards have gotten surprisingly capable with features like text prediction and swipe input. Thumb-typing with physical keys used to be the gold standard for mobile text entry, but now it’s slower than on-screen methods. Without the keyboard as a selling point, there may not be a place for BlackBerry phones.
