One of the stars of the working-out-from-home boom is struggling. Peloton won’t go quietly though and is making some big changes. The company will replace the CEO and co-founder, John Foley, who will become executive chairman, with former Spotify COO Barry McCarthy reportedly set to step into his shoes. While Foley is sticking around, the company is cutting around 2,800 corporate positions — these won’t include Peloton’s instructors who lead its live classes. The company said in a press release about the lay-offs that its “monthly membership will be complimentary for impacted team members for an additional 12 months." I'm not sure how they feel about that.

This all means we're back to speculating whether Peloton might be bought and folded into a bigger entity. Reports have suggested that Amazon and Nike are both looking into the possibilities, while pundits and analysts have long suspected Apple might pick it up as part of its fitness push. It could be a cheap purchase: Peloton reached a market value of $50 billion in January 2021, but it’s currently circling a $8 billion valuation.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Spotify's problems are bigger than Joe Rogan

• NASA picks Lockheed Martin to build a rocket that will return from Mars

• What to expect from Samsung's Unpacked event

• Amazon more than doubles base pay for corporate and tech employees

• Lemondrop and Fireball review: Impossibly small, surprisingly powerful synths

• NVIDIA officially abandons its plans to purchase ARM

Samsung leak reveals some very big Galaxy S8 Tabs

Expect to see an Ultra model with a large 14.6-inch OLED screen.

Engadget

Just ahead of Samsung's Unpacked event set for tomorrow, Evan Blass revealed a press release for Samsung's Galaxy Tab S8 lineup in his Substack newsletter. It confirms many key specs from earlier leaks, including the existence of an "Ultra model" — likely to be the most intriguing of the often straightforward, sometimes bland, tablet series. All the finer details will come later today: join us as we livestream everything Samsung reveals at Unpacked later today. It all kicks off at 10 AM ET (7 AM PT).

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Apple scores its first Oscar nomination for Best Picture

Netflix leads the streaming pack with 27 nods.

Apple

Apple’s TV+ films received six Oscar nods overall, up from two last year. Most significantly, Apple has broken through in the Best Picture category. CODA is the first Apple Original movie to receive a nomination for the top prize. Elsewhere, Netflix continued to push hard for plaudits, with a whopping 27 nominations across the board. Climate change satire Don’t Look Up, packed with Oscar winners like Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Western The Power of the Dog both have nominations for Best Picture.

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Samsung is adding a load of new health features to the Galaxy Watch 4

Because it’s not got a busy enough week.

Today, Samsung is rolling out an update that enhances some of the Galaxy Watch 4's and Watch 4 Classic's health and wellness features. While the watches have long been able to perform body composition scans, the update adds insights about those results powered by Chris Hemsworth's fitness app, Centr. This includes a 30-day free trial to the app, which typically only lasts for seven days — and is pretty pricey after that. Other features include interval training for runners, sleep coaching and a load of new watch face colors and digital watch faces.

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What we bought: A lid that makes the Instant Pot good at slow cooking

The tempered glass and steam hole make a huge difference.

The Instant Pot does a lot of things well, but there are a few upgrades if you’re looking to maximize what the giant kitchen gadget is capable of. For a lot less than the air fryer companion, you can improve the Instant Pot’s slow-cooking potential with a very simple tweak: a fitted glass lid. Editor in Chief Dana Wollman dives a little deeper into the world of Instant Pot recipes.

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Tinder will stop charging older users more for premium features

A new report details just how drastically Tinder+ prices can fluctuate.

Tinder says it"ill no longer charge older users more to use Tinder+, following a new report questioning the dating app’s practice of charging older users “substantially more.”

Tinder+ pricing can vary a lot based on users’ age. The report relied on “mystery shoppers” in six countries — the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Korea, India and Brazil — who signed up for Tinder+. According to the report, Tinder users between the ages of 30 and 49 were charged an average of 65.3 percent more than their younger counterparts in every country except Brazil. Tinder says it plans to abandon its age-based pricing altogether, having already halted it in the US, Australia and UK. (After a class-action lawsuit in California.)

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Apple's Tap to Pay lets iPhones accept contactless payments

Shops won't need dongles or terminals to take your money.

Apple has revealed Tap to Pay on iPhone, an upcoming feature that will let businesses accept payments just by bumping handsets (and the Apple Watch) — no extra hardware needed. The tech requires an iPhone XS or later and will also work with other digital wallets beyond the company’s own Apple Pay. Likewise, it’ll be compatible with contact-free credit and debit cards. Stripe is already planning to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to business customers. 

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This year’s Academy Awards nominations have been revealed, and Apple TV+ execs will surely be pleased. The service’s films received six Oscar nods overall, up from two last year. Most significantly, Apple has broken through in the Best Picture category. CODA is the first Apple Original movie to receive a nomination for the top prize.

It’s the first film with a principally deaf cast to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s been 35 years since a deaf performer was nominated, and Troy Kotsur is now the first male actor to ever receive a nod, as he’s up for Best Supporting Actor.

Writer and director Sian Heder is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay — CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier. Apple paid a Sundance record of $25 million to acquire the rights to the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama and the Audience Award at last year’s festival.

The other Apple movie that received nominations this year was Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. It earned nods for Best Actor for Denzel Washington, Best Cinematography and Best Production Design.

Elsewhere, Netflix continued the run of awards success it has had over the last few years with a whopping 35 nominations across the board. Star-studded climate change satire Don’t Look Up and Western The Power of the Dog are both nominated for Best Picture. The latter leads the pack overall with 12 nominations. Jane Campion, who received writing and directing nods, is the first woman to land two Best Director nominations. Other nominated Netflix films include The Lost Daughter, The Hand of God, Tick, Tick… Boom and the fantastic The Mitchells vs. The Machines.

Elsewhere, Dune has 10 nominations and Best Picture frontrunner Belfast received seven. Amazon’s Being the Ricardos landed three acting nods, while No Time To Die, which marks Daniel Craig's final outing as James Bond, was nominated for Original Song, Sound and Visual Effects. Meanwhile, Japanese drama Drive My Car broke through in the Best Picture and directing races for four nominations in total.

The 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27th.

Hulu has dropped the first trailer for The Dropout, a miniseries about the failed blood-testing startup Theranos. Amanda Seyfried stars as its embattled former CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. The two-and-a-half-minute preview shows Holmes dropping out of Stanford to found Theranos. It includes snippets of the company's high points (it raised more than $700 million in investments) and hints at its very public demise, as well as Holmes developing her infamously deep voice.

The trailer is full of familiar faces, including Naveen Andrews (Lost) as Sunny Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos and Holmes' ex-boyfriend. Stephen Fry, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf and Sam Waterston also appear.

Theranos claimed to offer rapid blood tests that required only a finger prick. However, multiple reports claimed the tests weren't effective. The SEC charged Holmes and Theranos with fraud in March 2018 and the company collapsed later that year.

The Dropout will premiere two months after Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors. She faces up to 20 years in prison and will be sentenced in September. With Holmes' trial fresh in the memory, some folks might be curious to learn more about the story behind her and Theranos. The trailer, which is edited in the style of a thriller, might draw some more attention to the show too.

The first three episodes of The Dropout will hit Hulu on March 3rd. Other installments will arrive on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence are working on a movie about Holmes and Theranos for Apple.

Apple has shared the first trailer for its upcoming TV+ exclusive Shining Girls. Starring Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale fame as a Chicago reporter in search of the man who assaulted her, the series will debut on April 29th with the first three episodes of the series available to stream that same day. Subsequent episodes will follow every Friday for the next five weeks.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, Shining Girls also stars Hamilton actor Phillipa Soo and Wagner Moura, best known for portraying Pablo Escobar in Netflix's Narcos, as the villain of the story. The story centers around a man named Harper Curtis, a Depression-era drifter who finds a house in Chicago with doors to other time periods. Curtis uses that power to kill young women with bright potential. The protagonist of the tale, Kirby Mazrachi, survives her encounter with Curtis and then turns the tables on him.

Just like it did last year, Netflix will release at least one movie a week in 2022. There are currently more than 70 films on the docket for this year, and the company offered a peek at some of them in a teaser.

The three-minute sizzle reel is packed with footage from upcoming films, including a first glimpse at Knives Out 2, the sequel to Rian Johnson's terrific 2019 comedy-mystery movie. There are looks at Enola Holmes 2, Jason Momoa as a half-man/half-beast in fantasy flick Slumberland and a stop-motion take on Pinocchio from Guillermo del Toro. You can also get your first peek at The Gray Man, a big-budget thriller from Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

Expect to see projects from filmmakers including Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Niki Caro, Sally El Hosaini, Louis Leterrier, Richard Linklater and Tyler Perry, as well as Dev Patel's directorial debut. Among the other films in Netflix's pipeline are sci-fi movies starring Halle Berry (The Mothership) and Adam Sandler (Spaceman) and a new version of Matilda. There is, as always, a broad range of offerings on this year's slate, including action, comedy, drama, horror and family movies. So, there should be something for everyone as Netflix seeks to make sure subscribers are getting their money's worth from its increasingly expensive plans.

Snap may not be particularly keen on the metaverse — at least, not as it’s been articulated by Mark Zuckerberg — but the company’s latest experiment certainly sounds a lot like a version of one. The company is teaming up with Universal to host a virtual concert featuring Jennifer Lopez and Colombian pop singer Maluma, which viewers can watch as their Bitmoji avatars.

The concert itself won’t take place in the Snapchat app, but would-be spectators can access the show by signing into the concert’s dedicated website with their Snapchat login. Users’ Bitmoji avatars will appear as spectators in the crowd. There are also a handful of interactive effects that will be available during the show, including the ability to start “the wave” and trigger a virtual laser effect. Lopez and Maluma will also appear as 3D Bitmoji avatars.

The event, scheduled for February 3rd, is meant to promote the upcoming rom-com Marry Me (also starring Lopez and Maluma), and is expected to last about 10 minutes, according to the company.

Virtual concerts have become one of the earliest examples of a metaverse-like experience. Fortnite’s in-game concerts are often referenced in discussions of what an eventual metaverse will look like. And Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has said he wants the Fortnite publisher to be a leader in the space. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also referenced concerts in the metaverse, writing last year that in the future people may be able to “teleport instantly as a hologram” in order to attend shows.

But Snap executives have talked about the metaverse very differently. Snap AR exec Sophia Dominguez told Engadget in December that the company’s vision for the future is not to “escape into another world” but create experiences that can bridge physical spaces with virtual ones. (Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put it slightly differently, remarking last fall on the dystopic origins of the word metaverse. “I think the basic notion was that you know as the physical world was sort of crumbling in this dystopian future that people would escape into this virtual world — that's not at all a focus for us,” he said referring to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.)

What’s less clear is if Snap intends for Bitmoji-led concerts to be a regular occurrence like Fortnite has (Live streaming platform Oz is powering the tech behind the show). But if the company’s first big foray into metaverse adjacent experiences is a hit, it’s not difficult to imagine Snap could host more Bitmoji-driven live events.

Using your face to unlock your phone is great in normal times, but less than ideal when you’re masked up and avoiding germs. Apple already has a workaround in place if you own a new enough Apple Watch, and now it’s working on a fix for the rest of us. The most recent iOS developer beta enables users to open their device with just the geography of their eyes. The feature, which is currently being tested, will work with glasses users, although if you’re wearing sunglasses, you might have to take them off first.

At the same time, Apple has also reportedly been looking into enabling iPhones to work as standalone payment terminals. That way, it would be easier to settle bills between friends and, more importantly, enable small businesses to accept payments. That might pose a problem for companies like Square, who have made a name for themselves building external payment hardware for phones. But it would also give Apple a way to corner a big chunk of the payment processing market without breaking much of a sweat.

- Dan Cooper

The biggest news stories you might have missed

• The 'Mortal Kombat' movie is getting a sequel

• Dark web news site owner sentenced for role in $8.4 million kickback scheme

• NASA hopes to speed up mission scheduling with help from Microsoft's Quantum division

• FCC proposes mandatory labels that clearly explain broadband services

• Warner Music Group is building a 'musical theme park' in the metaverse

• Wyze will discontinue its first camera on February 1st

Strange Milky Way object sends radio bursts a minute at a time

Someone call Jeff Goldblum.

ICRAR

This next story works better if you imagine William Shatner circa 1979 is reading it out to you. Researchers out of Curtin University have found something… odd, out there in space, a spinning object 4,000 light-years away. It’s been sending out a giant burst of polarized radio energy for a full minute, every 18 minutes, and keeps… appearing and disappearing every few hours. It’s a curiosity that the researchers think might be a magnetar, a theoretical neutron star spinning so slowly that it causes everything to look… strange. This discovery may have… implications for how we understand… the universe.

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Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance confirms plans to build 35 new EVs by 2030

Cars!

Nissan

The gang over at Renault Nissan Mitsubishi has revealed a plan to invest around $26 billion in order to bring 35 new electric vehicles to market by 2030. Five new platforms will be built, with the crew pledging that technology and components will be shared to reduce waste. That will run from super-compact all-electric city cars through to beefy battery commercial vehicles. Meanwhile, California has unveiled a $10 billion plan to increase EV adoption, including cash to build out charging networks in low-income neighborhoods and discounts for low-income buyers.

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Shure Aonic 40 review: Decent ANC headphones with impressive battery life

But otherwise? Ehhhhh.

Bllly Steele

Your friend and mine Billy Steele has been road-testing the new Shure Aonic 40 ANC cans for a while, and now his verdict is out. The headphones, which are priced at $249, are designed to sit in that tier just before you start shelling out serious money for your ears. Sadly, while the price is right and the battery life is great, everything else is just a bit lukewarm for Billy’s trained ears. He also lamented the lack of comfort for bigger heads, and an overall lack of polish in the rest of the feature list.

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Uber's rise to prominence might have been difficult to believe even as fiction, had it not been documented at every turn by ever-more concerning reports of overreach. The quasi-legal taxi business (that likely still misclassifies an enormous number of drivers) belied a toxic boys club workplace culture where just about any avenue to get ahead— including actively deceiving cops — was the norm. We're led to believe some of those things have since changed.

Of all that can be said of the company under its original CEO Travis Kalanick, it wasn't short on depravity. Incidentally, that's the sort of thing that tends to make for good TV. 

Based on the book of the same title by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, Super Pumped puts Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the shoes of Kalanick, chronicling the taxi-hailing app on its relentless trajectory, towards (and I don't think I'm spoiling anything here) it's widespread success, a vehement public backlash and Kalanick's eventual departure. Kyle Chandler seems poised to play the foil as venture capitalist Bill Gurley, while the trailer also teases an unusual appearance for Uma Thurman as Arianna Huffington. 

The anthology series, which is set to cover a different business leader each season, is slated to premier this February 27th. So far there's no indication of which companies will be featured after this dramatization of Uber, but there's certainly no shortage of cruel, cutthroat CEOs in the world. 

Warner Bros. and New Line are creating a sequel to the Mortal Kombat film with Moon Knight writer Jeremy Slater onboard, Deadline has reported. It will follow up the original R-rated film that did decent box office numbers ($83 million world wide) considering the pandemic, and was HBO Max's most successful film to date when it launched last April. 

On top of creating Moon Knight (with Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke), Slater is working on Stephen King's The Tommyknockers adaptation for Universal and an upcoming Netflix movie directed by Travis Knight. He also developed The Umbrella Academy for Netflix. 

The original film was as gory as you'd expect considering the violence of the game, but screenwriter Greg Russo also tried to inject some humor. It's not known if Mortal Kombat director Simon McQuoid will be involved again, but last year he said a sequel could happen "if the fans want another one." 

The original did seem designed to set up another sequel, though, with one one critic describing it as "the homework you have to do before the fun." It received a middling 54 percent Rotten Tomato critic rating, but was appreciated more by audiences that gave it an 86 percent score. 

After a hiatus of more than a decade, the world’s favorite fictitious British inventor (or possibly second after Q from James Bond) and his lovable canine sidekick are making a comeback. Today as part of its ongoing partnership with Aardman Animations Netflix announced the arrival of a new Wallace & Gromit movie and the long-awaited sequel to Chicken Run.

Due out sometime in 2023, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget picks up after Ginger and Rocky’s daring escape with the hatching of the couple’s new chick Molly at their new island sanctuary home. And while Julia Sawalha and Mel Gibson won’t be reprising their roles as the leading chickens, Dawn of the Nugget’s cast will still feature some big-name stars including Thandie Newton (Ginger), Zachary Levi (Rocky) and Bella Ramsey (Molly), the latter of whom is also set to play Ellie in HBO’s upcoming live-action TV adaptation of The Last of Us.

As for the still-untitled Wallace & Gromit movie, original series creator Nick Park will be returning as director featuring a story written by Park and Mark Burton (Madagascar, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Shaun of the Sheep Movie). Slated to arrive almost two decades after The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace and Gromit’s second feature-length film revolves around Wallace’s latest invention: a “smart gnome” that has developed a mind of its own. Queue the hijinx.

Notably, unlike Dawn of the Nugget which will be a worldwide exclusive on Netflix when it starts streaming sometime next year, the new Wallace & Gromit movie will debut first on the BBC in the UK before becoming available on Netflix in all other regions sometime in 2024.

With Aardman and Netlix’s stop-motion musical Robin Robin having been recently shortlisted for the Oscar’s in the animated short film category, it’s nice to see even more claymation movies get the green light–especially after the bomb that was 2018’s Early Man. That said, with the original Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit having already claimed the number one and two spots as the highest-grossing stop-motion animated films of all time, Aardman Studios might have a hard time competing for attention in a time when traditional computer-animated films have dominated the box office.