Don't worry if you missed out on an earlier deal for Apple's 2021 iPad. Amazon is selling the 64GB entry-level iPad for $299, or $30 off the usual price. The 256GB variant recently dropped a similar amount to $449. That matches a previous discount at Walmart and Amazon, and is currently the lowest price we've seen for Apple's latest 10.2-inch slate. Just don't fret over color choices or shipping times — only Space Gray models appear to be in stock, and you'll have to wait around three weeks for it to be delivered.
The basic design of the iPad hasn't changed much in recent years, but the under-the-hood upgrades are particularly notable this year. The tablet now uses an A13 Bionic chip that's reportedly 20 percent faster than in the previous iPad, making it a better fit for gaming or creative tasks. This may also be a good pick for an era of remote work and virtual friend visits, as an ultra-wide 12MP front camera offers Center Stage to keep you in view as you move around.
Just don't expect a revamp on par with the new iPad mini or 2020's iPad Air. You won't find an all-screen design, USB-C, second-generation Pencil support or an improved rear camera. This is for anyone who wants a no-frills tablet that should still last a long while — if that's all you're looking for, you'll probably be happy.
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It was always Jinx and Vi. They’re the sisters at the heart of Riot Games’ hit Netflix series, Arcane, and they were picked for the spotlight out of a lineup of more than 150 League of Legends champions.
For Arcane creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee, the stars really couldn’t have been anyone else from League of Legends lore. Especially not Teemo. Linke and Yee have been preparing Jinx and Vi for their leading roles in a mature, mainstream, animated TV series for the past nine years, even if they didn’t know it the entire time.
Back in December 2012, Vi debuted and became the first League of Legends champion to receive a login screen complete with an original, lyrical song. A year later, Jinx joined the game’s ranks and starred in its first character-driven cinematic, a high-energy music video called Get Jinxed. Linke and Yee worked on both of these releases, flexing their creative muscles in music and narrative storyboarding, two aspects that didn’t get much attention in the core game-development process.
The Jinx cinematic was also the first time Riot partnered with Fortiche Production, the studio behind Arcane’s otherworldly animation style.
“They kind of got our special treatment already because we just really liked them,” Linke told Engadget. “And so, when we had to think about like, which characters do we want to stick with for many years to come? I think it was pretty obvious.”
Yee agreed and added, “Both of them were a bit of a milestone, I think, for our time at Riot.”
In-game, Jinx and Vi are sisters and bitter enemies, though this story fades into the background of the action, appearing only in small voice lines and character descriptions. As an online MOBA, narrative isn’t critical to the way League of Legends plays, but Riot has infused its champions with more lore over the years, focusing on expanding their universe beyond the game launcher.
Nowadays, Riot is a hub of creative development across multiple mediums, including short stories, graphic novels, cinematics, music videos and one truly fantastic K-pop group. Arcane is the studio’s biggest push onto a mainstream service, and Jinx and Vi carry the story, surrounded by a handful of other champions, including Caitlyn, Jayce and Viktor, and other original characters.
Jinx and Vi were always intriguing to Linke and Yee. They were grounded in a way that the game’s more fantastical champions weren’t, with distinct, opposing personalities and an unexplained rivalry that clearly cut both sisters to the core. Vi was a powerful, rigid Enforcer working for the prosperous city of Piltover, while Jinx was an anarchist with a belt full of bombs and no filter. Vi’s hair is short and pink, while Jinx’s is long and bright blue.
“If you just imagine those two characters together in a scene, whatever location, whatever they would be debating – you know, what kind of food they're going to get in the evening, or what kind of movie they're going to watch,” Linke said. “It's just always going to be fun, because they're always going to have these very different perspectives.”
There’s an inherent question in Jinx and Vi’s shared backstory, Yee said, and it’s a mystery that fans of the game and newcomers to the show would be able to grasp quickly: If they’re sisters, why do they hate each other so much? Arcane asks that question and slowly answers it, providing a rich, emotionally charged origin story for Jinx, Vi and their surrounding champions along the way.
“The fact that Jinx and Vi’s relationship is a bit of a mystery from the outset allows us to sort of satisfy both audiences,” Yee said.
In Arcane, Linke and Yee were able to zoom in and focus on the small details that bring their characters to life, showing micro-expressions and all-consuming rage on Jinx’s face, or giving Vi a nuanced nervous tick, like bouncing her leg. Fortiche Production, the studio that handles animation duties for Arcane and other Riot projects, was a pivotal part of this development process. Animators there were given leeway to express themselves in the characters, Linke said, and this resulted in a unique visual style that flowed like motion-capture, even though it was completely hand-drawn.
“We also tried to really treat the animators like actors who can find their ways of expressing things, rather than just kind of saying, make Jinx or Vi do this,” Linke said. “But instead, just being like, here's what's going on in their head, how can we really make that feel real?”
Riot Games
After nearly 10 years of in-game development and cross-media projects, Jinx and Vi are still able to surprise Linke and Yee. Developing Arcane, for instance, marked the first time they’d seen any League of Legends champion actually speaking, mouth movements and all.
“When we did our first trial, or our first test animatic for the show, it was the first time we'd ever seen any of our champions talk,” Yee said. “We'd never – their mouths don't move in game, you know. So it was a very funny milestone to cross at that point.”
Given how well Arcane has been received by League of Legends fans and newcomers alike, there are plenty more creative milestones to come as Riot continues its ride into mainstream entertainment. Season two of Arcaneis in production as we — and Jinx and Vi — speak.
Like many Apple products, the Apple Watch can be extremely simple to start using — but that simplicity hides a surprising level of depth and customization. If you just received an Apple Watch, there’s a lot to do to make sure you’re getting the most out of your new wearable. Let us guide you through that process, from initial setup to optimizing everything it can do.
Setup
Of course, the first thing you’ll want to do is pair your Apple Watch with your iPhone. Even if you have a cellular-capable Apple Watch, an iPhone is required for setting up and managing the device. Fortunately, this process is extremely straightforward — after powering on the Apple Watch, just place it near an unlocked iPhone and you’ll get a prompt to set the device up. During this process, your iPhone will walk you through the initial pairing as well as signing in with your Apple ID, assigning a passcode to your Watch, setting up things like Siri and Apple Pay, and deciding if you want to transfer your compatible apps to the Watch. I recommend against transferring all your apps automatically this first time, as the Watch is a lot more useful when you curate it with only what you need.
A few features you definitely should set up are fall detection and emergency SOS. The latter lets you quickly place a call to local emergency services by pressing and holding the side button, while fall detection uses the Watch’s accelerometers and other sensors to, well, detect if you’ve taken a bad spill. It’ll initiate an emergency SOS call automatically if it detects a fall and doesn’t detect you moving. Before making that call, the Watch will try its best to get your attention via a notification, a vibration and an audible alarm.
The fun part: tweaking apps and notifications
Engadget
Once you have the basics set up, it’s time to make the Apple Watch your own. By default, the Apple Watch mirrors all notifications that go to your phone. But I’ve found the Watch to be much more useful with a bit of curation. In the iPhone Watch app, you can customize notifications for all of Apple’s first-party apps, or turn them off entirely. For example, the Activity app notifications panel lets you choose whether or not you want reminders to stand every hour, or notifications when your friends share activity milestones with you and so forth.
Third-party apps don’t have the same granularity, but you can turn them off so they won’t ping your Watch. For things that aren’t particularly time-sensitive (say, updates from Google Photos, or if you don’t want the Apple News app overloading your wrist), feel free to turn them off. They’ll still hit your iPhone, and you can always enable them again later.
The iPhone Watch app also lets you pick which specific apps from your iPhone will be installed on the Apple Watch. I think this is more useful than just letting the Watch install every single compatible app, because that might mean you have a few dozen apps to sift through on your Watch to see if they’re useful or not. Instead, I prefer going through the list and deciding if there’s a benefit to having these apps on my wrist. In the case of apps like Google Maps or Ecobee for controlling my thermostat, it’s a definite yes. But things like Etsy or Bank of America don’t exactly make a ton of sense on a Watch. And if you ever change your mind, you can remove an app from the Watch app or by long-pressing it in grid view and deleting it – just keep in mind that this will remove the app from your Watch but not from your iPhone.
That said, I have been surprised at what some developers have envisioned for the Apple Watch. Take the notes app Bear, for example. I often use it to make grocery lists, and checklists show up great on the Apple Watch. So if there’s an app on your phone that you consider essential, give it a shot on the Watch.
Watch faces
Another occasionally-overlooked part of the Apple Watch experience are watch faces. Since this is literally what you’ll see every time you raise your wrist, I think it’s worth finding ones that fit your personal style. While there are no third-party faces, the Apple Watch has more than 30 built-in options that are endlessly customizable. We’re talking about a huge variety of colors, different typefaces and watch face styles, complications (small slices of info like weather, date, or music controls) and much more. You can have a simple digital time display with nothing else, or an info-dense face with eight different complications or anything in between.
You can set up new faces on the Watch directly — but as with most in-depth features, it’s easier to do this on the iPhone. The Face Gallery shows every available face, along with multiple examples of how they can be customized. You can use those as a jumping off point to make your own creations. Once you’ve curated your favorites, you can simply swipe through them on the Watch itself when you want to mix things up. If you long press on a face, you can edit it directly on your Watch too, which is handy when you want to just change the color quickly to better match your outfit.
If you’re using an Apple Watch Series 5, 6 or 7, you can also decide whether you want to activate the always-on display. You can find this option in the settings app, under “Display & Brightness.” If you’re after maximum battery life, turn this off, but most people will probably prefer it on. New watches can still get a full day of use while using the always-on feature, but once your watch ages a bit and battery performance degrades, you might want to learn to live without it.
Fitness tracking
One of the biggest Apple Watch selling points is its fitness-tracking features. Whether or not you actively exercise on a regular basis, the Watch will track your steps and activity level, and use that data to track your daily movement via three rings that you’re encouraged to close. The “move” ring is how many active calories you burn in a day, the “exercise” ring tracks activity at or above a brisk walk, and the “stand” ring tracks whether or not you get up and move for a minute or two each hour of the day.
When you set up your Apple Watch, it’ll suggest daily goals for each of these, and the Activity app (or the Fitness app on your iPhone) will show how close you are to hitting them. If you’ve never used an Apple Watch before, it’s fine to just go with the defaults — every week, you’ll get a recap of how you did and it’ll even suggest bumping up your Move number if you’re easily surpassing it. The exercise and stand options default to 30 minutes per day and 12 hours per day, but those too can be adjusted.
For extra motivation, the Fitness app lets you connect with other friends who use an Apple Watch and see how much progress they’re making against their three rings. Naturally, you can use this information to taunt them about their couch-potato habits, but you can also challenge them to informal competitions. You earn points based on the percentage you close each of your rings every day, and the person with the most points after a week wins. It’s pretty casual, but it’s also a fun way to stay motivated.
If you want to track a specific workout, like a run, walk, or weight-training session you do that in the “workout” app. There, you’ll find the many different types of workouts that the Watch can track. If you already have a favorite way to track exercise on your phone, though, chances are you can find it for the Apple Watch too. Nike Run Club, MapMyRun, Peloton and others all have Watch apps that let you track workouts using the wearable’s sensors. Also, a lot of apps can now connect with the Health app on your iPhone. It’s a database of all your activity and workout data from your Watch, so you might be able to easily sync workout data from there into your service of choice. As with most things Apple Watch, it’ll just take a bit of playing around to see what works best for you.
Music
One of my favorite things about the Apple Watch is that it can stream music and podcasts – not just from Apple’s services but others like Spotify and Pandora as well. You’ll need a cellular-capable Watch to stream music without your phone, but the good news is that Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora all allow you to save music directly on the Watch as well. Regardless of whether you spring for the cellular model or not, there’s a way to listen to tunes and leave your phone behind.
If you’re an Apple Music user, you’ll manage downloaded music through the Watch app on your iPhone. Pop that open and go to the “Music” section and you’ll see a big button to add songs to your watch. There’s also a setting that’ll automatically download albums and playlists you’ve listened to recently – turn that on and you’ll always have some music on your wrist.
It’s easy to choose specific albums or playlists you want saved, too. Just hit the big plus button and you’ll see your Apple Music library. From there, just navigate to what you want, hit another plus button and it’ll be downloaded to your Watch. Note that music only transfers when your Watch is charging, so you’ll need to take it off your wrist to sync.
If you’re using Spotify, just navigate to an album, playlist or podcast on your phone and tap the three dots icon – you’ll see an option to “download to Apple Watch” there. Then, on your watch, there’s a clearly-marked “downloads” section where you can play content without a connection.
Experiment, experiment, experiment!
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
Like many Apple products, the Apple Watch has a lot of functionality and hidden complexity beneath its user-friendly surface. But I’ve found that the Watch hides a lot of features, so it’s worth checking out the built-in Tips app for suggestions on what you can do. Without a guide like that, you’ll probably never realize that clicking the side button twice summons Apple Pay, or that you can display the grid of icons in a list if you prefer. Chances are good you’re not going to irrevocably mess something up, so tap and swipe and scroll and dig into the settings.
With modern consoles offering gamers graphics so photorealistic that they blur the line between CGI and reality, it's easy forget just how cartoonishly blocky they were in the 8-bit era. In his new book, Creating Q*Bert and Other Classic Arcade Games, legendary game designer and programmer Warren Davis recalls his halcyon days imagining and designing some of the biggest hits to ever grace an arcade. In the excerpt below, Davis explains how the industry made its technological leap from 8- to 12-bit graphics.
Back at my regular day job, I became particularly fascinated with a new product that came out for the Amiga computer: a video digitizer made by a company called A-Squared. Let’s unpack all that slowly.
The Amiga was a recently released home computer capable of unprecedented graphics and sound: 4,096 colors! Eight-bit stereo sound! There were image manipulation programs for it that could do things no other computer, including the IBM PC, could do. We had one at Williams not only because of its capabilities, but also because our own Jack Haeger, an immensely talented artist who’d worked on Sinistar at Williams a few years earlier, was also the art director for the Amiga design team.
Video digitization is the process of grabbing a video image from some video source, like a camera or a videotape, and converting it into pixel data that a computer system (or video game) could use. A full-color photograph might contain millions of colors, many just subtly different from one another. Even though the Amiga could only display 4,096 colors, that was enough to see an image on its monitor that looked almost perfectly photographic.
Our video game system still could only display 16 colors total. At that level, photographic images were just not possible. But we (and by that I mean everyone working in the video game industry) knew that would change. As memory became cheaper and processors faster, we knew that 256-color systems would soon be possible. In fact, when I started looking into digitized video, our hardware designer, Mark Loffredo, was already playing around with ideas for a new 256-color hardware system.
Let’s talk about color resolution for a second. Come on, you know you want to. No worries if you don’t, though, you can skip these next few paragraphs if you like. Color resolution is the number of colors a computer system is capable of displaying. And it’s all tied in to memory. For example, our video game system could display 16 colors. But artists weren’t locked into 16 specific colors. The hardware used a “palette.” Artists could choose from a fairly wide range of colors, but only 16 of them could be saved in the palette at any given time. Those colors could be programmed to change while a game was running. In fact, changing colors in a palette dynamically allowed for a common technique used in old video games called “color cycling.”
For the hardware to know what color to display at each pixel location, each pixel on the screen had to be identified as one of those 16 colors in the palette. The collection of memory that contained the color values for every pixel on the screen was called “screen memory.” Numerically, it takes 4 bits (half a byte) to represent 16 numbers (trust me on the math here), so if 4 bits = 1 pixel, then 1 byte of memory could hold 2 pixels. By contrast, if you wanted to be able to display 256 colors, it would take 8 bits to represent 256 numbers. That’s 1 byte (or 8 bits) per pixel.
So you’d need twice as much screen memory to display 256 colors as you would to display 16. Memory wasn’t cheap, though, and game manufacturers wanted to keep costs down as much as possible. So memory prices had to drop before management approved doubling the screen memory.
Today we take for granted color resolutions of 24 bits per pixel (which potentially allows up to 16,777,216 colors and true photographic quality). But back then, 256 colors seemed like such a luxury. Even though it didn’t approach the 4,096 colors of the Amiga, I was convinced that such a system could result in close to photo-realistic images. And the idea of having movie-quality images in a video game was very exciting to me, so I pitched to management the advantages of getting a head start on this technology. They agreed and bought the digitizer for me to play around with.
The Amiga’s digitizer was crude. Very crude. It came with a piece of hardware that plugged into the Amiga on one end, and to the video output of a black-and-white surveillance camera (sold separately) on the other. The camera needed to be mounted on a tripod so it didn’t move. You pointed it at something (that also couldn’t move), and put a color wheel between the camera and the subject. The color wheel was a circular piece of plastic divided into quarters with different tints: red, green, blue, and clear.
When you started the digitizing process, a motor turned the color wheel very slowly, and in about thirty to forty seconds you had a full-color digitized image of your subject. “Full-color” on the Amiga meant 4 bits of red, green, and blue—or 12-bit color, resulting in a total of 4,096 colors possible.
It’s hard to believe just how exciting this was! At that time, it was like something from science fiction. And the coolness of it wasn’t so much how it worked (because it was pretty damn clunky) but the potential that was there. The Amiga digitizer wasn’t practical—the camera and subject needed to be still for so long, and the time it took to grab each image made the process mind-numbingly slow—but just having the ability to produce 12-bit images at all enabled me to start exploring algorithms for color reduction.
Color reduction is the process of taking an image with a lot of colors (say, up to the 16,777,216 possible colors in a 24-bit image) and finding a smaller number of colors (say, 256) to best represent that image. If you could do that, then those 256 colors would form a palette, and every pixel in the image would be represented by a number—an “index” that pointed to one of the colors in that palette. As I mentioned earlier, with a palette of 256 colors, each index could fit into a single byte.
But I needed an algorithm to figure out how to pick the best 256 colors out of the thousands that might be present in a digitized image. Since there was no internet back then, I went to libraries and began combing through academic journals and technical magazines, searching for research done in this area. Eventually, I found some! There were numerous papers written on the subject, each outlining a different approach, some easier to understand than others. Over the next few weeks, I implemented a few of these algorithms for generating 256 color palettes using test images from the Amiga digitizer. Some gave better results than others. Images that were inherently monochromatic looked the best, since many of the 256 colors could be allotted to different shades of a single color.
During this time, Loffredo was busy developing his 256-color hardware. His plan was to support multiple circuit boards, which could be inserted into slots as needed, much like a PC. A single board would give you one surface plane to draw on. A second board gave you two planes, foreground and background, and so on. With enough planes, and by having each plane scroll horizontally at a slightly different rate, you could give the illusion of depth in a side-scrolling game.
All was moving along smoothly until the day word came down that Eugene Jarvis had completed his MBA and was returning to Williams to head up the video department. This was big news! I think most people were pretty excited about this. I know I was, because despite our movement toward 256-color hardware, the video department was still without a strong leader at the helm. Eugene, given his already legendary status at Williams, was the perfect person to take the lead, partly because he had some strong ideas of where to take the department, and also due to management’s faith in him. Whereas anybody else would have to convince management to go along with an idea, Eugene pretty much had carte blanche in their eyes. Once he was back, he told management what we needed to do and they made sure he, and we, had the resources to do it.
This meant, however, that Loffredo’s planar hardware system was toast. Eugene had his own ideas, and everyone quickly jumped on board. He wanted to create a 256-color system based on a new CPU chip from Texas Instruments, the 34010 GSP (Graphics System Processor). The 34010 was revolutionary in that it included graphics-related features within its core. Normally, CPUs would have no direct connection to the graphics portion of the hardware, though there might be some co-processor to handle graphics chores (such as Williams’ proprietary VLSI blitter). But the 34010 had that capability on board, obviating the need for a graphics co-processor.
Looking at the 34010’s specs, however, revealed that the speed of its graphics functions, while well-suited for light graphics work such as spreadsheets and word processors, was certainly not fast enough for pushing pixels the way we needed. So Mark Loffredo went back to the drawing board to design a VLSI blitter chip for the new system.
Around this time, a new piece of hardware arrived in the marketplace that signaled the next generation of video digitizing. It was called the Image Capture Board (ICB), and it was developed by a group within AT&T called the EPICenter (which eventually split from AT&T and became Truevision). The ICB was one of three boards offered, the others being the VDA (Video Display Adapter, with no digitizing capability) and the Targa (which came in three different configurations: 8-bit, 16-bit, and 24-bit). The ICB came with a piece of software called TIPS that allowed you to digitize images and do some minor editing on them. All of these boards were designed to plug in to an internal slot on a PC running MS-DOS, the original text-based operating system for the IBM PC. (You may be wondering . . . where was Windows? Windows 1.0 was introduced in 1985, but it was terribly clunky and not widely used or accepted. Windows really didn’t achieve any kind of popularity until version 3.0, which arrived in 1990, a few years after the release of Truvision’s boards.)
A little bit of trivia: the TGA file format that’s still around today (though not as popular as it once was) was created by Truevision for the TARGA series of boards. The ICB was a huge leap forward from the Amiga digitizer in that you could use a color video camera (no more black-and-white camera or color wheel), and the time to grab a frame was drastically reduced—not quite instantaneous, as I recall, but only a second or two, rather than thirty or forty seconds. And it internally stored colors as 16-bits, rather than 12 like the Amiga. This meant 5 bits each of red, green, and blue—the same that our game hardware used—resulting in a true-color image of up to 32,768 colors, rather than 4,096. Palette reduction would still be a crucial step in the process. The greatest thing about the Truevision boards was they came with a Software Development Kit (SDK), which meant I could write my own software to control the board, tailoring it to my specific needs. This was truly amazing! Once again, I was so excited about the possibilities that my head was spinning.
I think it’s safe to say that most people making video games in those days thought about the future. We realized that the speed and memory limitations we were forced to work under were a temporary constraint. We realized that whether the video game industry was a fad or not, we were at the forefront of a new form of storytelling. Maybe this was a little more true for me because of my interest in filmmaking, or maybe not. But my experiences so far in the game industry fueled my imagination about what might come. And for me, the holy grail was interactive movies. The notion of telling a story in which the player was not a passive viewer but an active participant was extremely compelling. People were already experimenting with it under the constraints of current technology. Zork and the rest of Infocom’s text adventure games were probably the earliest examples, and more would follow with every improvement in technology. But what I didn’t know was if the technology needed to achieve my end goal—fully interactive movies with film-quality graphics—would ever be possible in my lifetime. I didn’t dwell on these visions of the future. They were just thoughts in my head. Yet, while it’s nice to dream, at some point you’ve got to come back down to earth. If you don’t take the one step in front of you, you can be sure you’ll never reach your ultimate destination, wherever that may be.
I dove into the task and began learning the specific capabilities of the board, as well as its limitations. With the first iteration of my software, which I dubbed WTARG (“W” for Williams, “TARG” for TARGA), you could grab a single image from either a live camera or a videotape. I added a few different palette reduction algorithms so you could try each and find the best palette for that image. More importantly, I added the ability to find the best palette for a group of images, since all the images of an animation needed to have a consistent look. There was no chroma key functionality in those early boards, so artists would have to erase the background manually. I added some tools to help them do that.
This was a far cry from what I ultimately hoped for, which was a system where we could point a camera at live actors and instantly have an animation of their action running on our game hardware. But it was a start.
The modern electric vehicle renaissance has been hampered from day one by the physical limitations imposed by the current state of battery technology. Inefficiencies in the form of heavy battery packs and low power densities have long limited not just the range and performance of EVs but the very forms they can take — there’s a reason Tesla started with a Roadster and not a Cybertruck. But steady advancements in power systems over the past few years — alongside skyrocketing demand for larger, electrified vehicles which cater to the US market — has led to a watershed moment in 2021: the emergence of EV pickups and SUVs.
Yes, we all know the Model X exists and Tesla “did it first” — spare me your tweets — however, the sheer number and variety of new, pure EV pickup and SUV models either ready to hit the showroom floor or in active development is staggering compared to just a few years ago. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s standouts.
The Hummer EV has been a surefire hit since its debut last October. More than 10,000 potential buyers had placed down payments on the $112,000 Hummer Edition 1 by last December. Similarly, the Hummer’s EV SUV variant revealed in April had its pre-orders sell out in minutes — not bad for a vehicle that won’t actually hit the streets until Fall 2023. Deliveries for the Hummer EV pickup are slated to begin this month. There have even been rumblings about adapting the Hummer EV frame and power system to military applications, though no firm decisions on that proposal have yet been made.
Hummers are only the start. In April, GM confirmed that its second EV model will be an electrified Silverado. We still don’t know a whole lot about the Silverado beyond that it will leverage GM’s Ultium battery tech, that the company is aiming for a 400-plus mile range, and that the EV pickup will offer four-wheel steering, which shortens turn radius’ at low speeds and increases cornering stability at high speeds — especially when towing loads.
We’ll have a full accounting of the Silverado’s capabilities once it makes its official debut during GM’s CES 2022 keynote address. What’s more, GM teased its third upcoming EV in July — a full-size GMC pickup, according to CNBC. Virtually nothing else is known about it at this time, not even if it will use the existing GMC Sierra branding. Hopefully, we’ll get some more hints in the new year.
Not to be outdone, the Stellantis Group (formerly FCA and umbrella company to Chrysler, Jeep Dodge, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and a host of others) announced in July that it, too, will be investing $35 billion towards its electrification efforts through 2025 and will have 55 electrified vehicles (40 BEVs, 15 PHEVs) available in the US and European markets by the end of that year. What’s more, Stellantis is working on an all-electric Ram EV to compete with the Silverado and Ford F-150 Lightning, though the Ram isn’t expected to be released until 2024. For its part in 2021, Jeep showed off a slick-looking Wrangler BEV concept in March, released its “light hybrid” Wrangler Sahara 4XE in May and debuted its PHEV Cherokee 4XE in September ahead of the vehicle’s 2022 release.
Ford also had a year worthy of honking its own horn about, starting with the February release of the Mustang Mach-E. The EV was met with a bit of trepidation to start but cemented its position with the release of the performance-focused GT edition. In all, Ford had sold more 21,000 Mach-E units through this past October, despite a handful of recalls for loose bolts and “deep sleeping” software bugs. That’s not bad for a first-year crossover SUV working to get past deeply ingrained customer nostalgia, but the Mach-E’s numbers are nothing compared to the hype Ford’s upcoming F-150 Lightning EV has garnered.
Interest in Ford’s upcoming light hybrid Maverick pickup has been no less rampant. The Detroit News reported in August that more than 100,000 people had allegedly signed up to preorder the mini-truck, a large portion of which were California residents. Granted, those folks weren’t obligated to place a down payment so whether all those pre-orders translate into actual sales — or folks just decide to restomod their existing ICE Fords with the eluminator system instead — remains to be seen.
This year, the company also announced plans to install 10,000 charging stations across North America by 2023, unveiled a membership plan for owners offering both Roadside and off-Roadside Assistance as well as exclusive OTA software updates, and outlined its Remote Care program which would offer remote diagnoses and on-site repairs for the electric trucks. The startup has big plans for the future as well. It announced plans to invest $5 billion in a second US-based production plant and is reportedly eyeing the UK as the site for its first international battery facility.
Some of those future plans will involve partnerships with other companies such as Amazon — which owns a 20 percent stake in Rivian, purchased 100,000 vehicles from the startup in 2019 and has already begun making deliveries in San Francisco and Los Angeles with them — but they won’t include Ford. Despite investing half a billion dollars in the EV startup two years ago, Ford announced in November that the two companies will no longer collaborate on an upcoming EV. Looks like that rumored electric Lincoln will likely stay dead for the time being.
FREDERIC J. BROWN via Getty Images
On the other end of the headline spectrum is, surprisingly, Tesla. Despite the company’s massively profitable year, the development of its Cybertruck has been slow going. While CEO Elon Musk announced in January that “volume production” of the EV SUV will begin in 2022, it’s increasingly looking like that will happen later in the year — after Ford’s F-150 Lightning and GMC’s Hummer EV hit the roads, both of which debuted well after the Cybertruck did.
We’ve seen much hype and grandiose promises about EV pickup trucks and SUVs over the last few years but 2022 will be the year when everything comes out in the wash. Consumers will finally be able to see these vehicles on the streets, in their neighborhoods, and likely breathing down their necks while stuck in traffic, rather than just on a showroom floor or livestream presentation stage. This is a huge opportunity for automakers to further evangelize the benefits of battery electrics over their internal combustion predecessors — this time using America’s favorite type of vehicle.
At long last, NASA has launched the James Webb Space Telescope. On Christmas morning, the telescope launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket after 14 years of development and a number of delays.
The JSWT will orbit the Sun, close to the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system. It will take around a month to reach its destination, after which researchers will be able to peek into black holes, observe some of the oldest galaxies in the universe and evaluate the habitability of various exoplanets.
NASA partnered with the European and Canadian space agencies to develop the project. The JSWT has been beset by delays throughout its long history. NASA initially hoped to launch it in 2007, but spiraling costs prompted engineers to re-think the telescope in 2005. The JSWT was then declared ready in 2016, but the project was once again put on hold because of construction complications. The telescope was assembled in 2019, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, leading to delays to testing and shipping.
After the JWST finally reached the spaceport, NASA set a launch date of December 18th. However, it delayed the launch until today due to last-minute inspections and a lack of favorable weather. Still, what's a few days for such an important, long-in-the-works mission? The JWST is finally spacebound, and in the coming months, we'll start to learn some of its discoveries.
After far too many delays over the years to count, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has a launch date. Provided there’s not another last-minute setback, the successor to Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to take flight on Saturday, December 25th.
NASA expects the Ariane 5 rocket carrying the JWST to lift off no earlier than 7:20AM ET on Christmas Day from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. You can watch the entire event unfold, beginning with pre-launch coverage, starting at 3AM ET. The space agency will broadcast the launch on its NASA Live website, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Twitch.
Understandably, there’s a lot of excitement for the JWST to finally make its way into space. Not only will a successful launch represent the end of a tumultuous 14-year development cycle, but the telescope, with its far more advanced sensors than Hubble, will afford astronomers to glimpse at black holes and early galaxies in a way they haven’t been able to do in the past.
Have you ever looked at your mouse and thought "it's fine, but kind of a big fat waste of space?" Gaming accessory company XPG apparently did, because it's just unveiled a concept mouse for CES 2022 with a built-in high-speed SSD drive stuffed inside, Digital Trends has reported.
The XPG Vault Gaming Mouse is a wired USB-C mouse that the company calls a "gaming library in the palm of your hand." The prototype model supports up to 1TB of memory that can run at a surprisingly fast 985 MB/s. The storage can be controlled by XPG's gaming software app. "Gaming Launcher software... promises to make your gaming libraries conveniently portable and [add] a higher level of game integration with XPG Prime Software Ecosystem," the company said.
It looks like a pretty normal mouse, though it'd require a pretty stout USB-C cable to support those kind of speeds. It's not the worst idea we've heard, because it gives you some high-speed storage while freeing up a USB slot that'd normally be taken by a wired mouse. XPG didn't mention the mouse's DPI or any other gaming specs.
Mice with built-in USB storage aren't unheard of, though we haven't seen anything notable recently. Wild gadgets often pop up at CES, however, helping companies grab some attention and publicity. Aside from the prototype mouse, XPG also unveiled some products that could come to market next year including PCIe Gen5X SSDs, DDR5 DRAM and the XPG Wired/Wireless Alpha gaming mouse.
A Russian court levied a 7.2 billion rouble ($98 million) fine against Google on Friday for what it claims are repeated failures by the company to delete content the country has deemed illegal. Though Russia has tagged numerous tech companies throughout the year with fines for not following its increasingly restrictive internet content rules, Friday's judgement marks the first time that the court has imposed fines based on a company's annual revenue.
Additionally, the Russian court fined Meta (and its subsidiary, Instagram) 2 billion roubles ($27.15 million) for similar offenses. Per Reuters, Meta is accused of failing to remove around 2,000 banned items while Google had reportedly failed to take down 2,600 bits of illicit content. Those include posts promoting drug use or dangerous behaviors, instructions for making improvised weapons and explosives, as well as anything regarding what and who it designates as extremists or terrorists. Or the spreading of "gay propaganda," apparently.
Google has announced it will review the court documents before deciding how to proceed. The company has 10 days to file an appeal.
This ruling is only the latest in Moscow's attempts to exert greater degrees of control over not just its national network but the internet as a whole and sets up an even larger confrontation come January 1st, when Russian authorities have demanded tech companies set up local servers for their online services.
For the past 31 years the Hubble Space Telescope has been an invaluably versatile observation platform for astronomers but it’s begun showing its age of late. Last serviced in 2009, the telescope has had to enter the partial-shutdown “safe mode” multiple times over the last few years — most recently, this October. And while optimistic estimates suggest that the Hubble could remain in operation through the end of the decade, NASA, with its ESA and CSA partners, have already spent more than a dozen years developing a successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). When the Webb launches — currently set for liftoff on Christmas Day — it will take over as humanity’s preeminent eye in the sky for decades to come.
The 7.2-ton JWST will be the largest telescope NASA has ever put into orbit. Its 6.5-meter primary mirror array — composed of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments — is more than twice the size of the Hubble’s and nearly 60 times larger in area than the Spitzer Telescope, which retired in 2020. The sun shield it uses to protect its delicate infrared sensors is nearly as long as a tennis court, and the telescope apparatus as a whole stands three stories tall. The 458 gigabits of data collected daily will be first routed through NASA’s Deep Space Network, then transmitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which will collate and disseminate that information to the greater astronomy community.
When it reaches its orbital home at the L2 Lagrange point 930,000 miles from Earth, the JWST will begin its four-point mission: searching for light from the earliest post-Big Bang stars; studying the formation and development of galaxies, examining the evolution of stars and planetary systems; and seeking out the origins of life.
To do so, the Webb will take a different approach from the Hubble before it. While the Hubble looked at the universe in the visible and ultraviolet spectrums, the JWST will see in infrared, just as the Spitzer used to but with far greater resolution and clarity. Using this infrared is critical to the Webb’s mission as that wavelength can peer through clouds of interstellar gasses and dust to see otherwise obscured objects beyond.
NASA/Chris Gunn
The Webb’s camera suite is made up of four individual components: the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph/Fine Guidance Sensor (NIRISS/FGS). These instruments are actually so sensitive that they can detect their own heat radiation when they’re operating. To minimize these infrared emissions, three of the sensors are chilled to negative 388 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 degrees C). The especially sensitive MIRI is cooled even further to -448 degrees F (-266 degrees C) — that’s a mere 7 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.
Getting the MIRI that cold is no easy feat. After the JWST makes its way into orbit, the telescope will spend weeks slowly chilling the sensor to its optimal operating temperature using a helium-based refrigeration system.
“It’s relatively easy to cool something down to that temperature on Earth, typically for scientific or industrial applications,” said JPL cryocooler specialist Konstantin Penanen in a recent NASA blog post. “But those Earth-based systems are very bulky and energy inefficient. For a space observatory, we need a cooler that is physically compact, highly energy efficient, and it has to be highly reliable because we can’t go out and repair it. So those are the challenges we faced, and in that respect, I would say the MIRI cryocooler is certainly at the cutting edge.”
The extra effort that MIRI requires will be well worth it as ground-based infrared telescopes — especially those operating within the mid-infrared spectrum as MIRI is, are largely hampered by heat emissions from the devices themselves and the surrounding atmosphere.
“With the other three instruments, Webb observes wavelengths up to 5 microns. Adding wavelengths out to 28.5 microns with MIRI really increases its range of science,” George Rieke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said earlier this month in a NASA blog. “This includes everything from studying protostars and their surrounding protoplanetary disks, the energy balance of exoplanets, mass loss from evolved stars, circumnuclear tori around the central black holes in active galactic nuclei, and a lot more.”
NASA
Given the JWST’s highly specific low temperature needs, keeping the telescope’s sensor suite out of direct sunlight (and blocked from other light sources like the Moon and Earth) is crucial. To ensure that those cameras are perpetually shaded, NASA engineers have built a five-layer sunshield made from aluminum-coated Kapton film to keep them in the cold, cold dark.
"The shape and design also direct heat out the sides, around the perimeter, between the layers," said James Cooper, the JWST’s Sunshield Manager at Goddard Space Flight Center. "Heat generated by the Spacecraft bus at the ‘core,’ or center, is forced out between the membrane layers so that it cannot heat up the optics."
Measuring 69.5 feet by 46.5 feet by .001 inches, the kite-shaped sun shield is stacked five layers high so that energy absorbed by the top layer radiates out into space between them, making each successive layer slightly cooler than the one above it. In fact, the temperature difference at the outermost (383K, or 230 degrees F) and innermost layers (36K, about -394 degrees F) is roughly an order of magnitude.
NASA
In order to collect enough light to view the fainest, most distant stars possible — some as far as 13 billion light years away — the JWST will rely on its massive 6.5m primary mirror array. Unlike the Hubble, which utilized a single 2.4m-wide mirror, the Webb’s mirror is divided into 18 individual segments, each weighing just 46 pounds thanks to their beryllium construction. They’re coated in gold to enhance their reflection of infrared light and hexagonal in shape so that, when fully assembled in orbit, they’ll fit together snugly enough to act as a single, symmetrical, gapless reflective plane. Their small size also allows them to easily be split up and folded down in order to fit within the tight confines of the Ariane 5 rocket they’ll ride into orbit.
ESA
The role of coordinating these segments to focus on a single spot in a distant galaxy falls to the mirrors’ actuator assembly. Seven small motors sit on the backside of each mirror segment (one at each corner and a seventh in the middle), enabling precise control of their orientation and curvature. "Aligning the primary mirror segments as though they are a single large mirror means each mirror is aligned to 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair,” said Webb Optical Telescope Element Manager, Lee Feinberg.
After 20-plus years of development and delays, costing $10 billion and involving the efforts of more than 10,000 people, the Webb Telescope is finally ready for launch — and hopefully this time it’ll actually take. The program has seen delay, after delay, after delay to its launch schedule. NASA abandoned the initial date of March 2021 in the wake of the initial COVID-19 outbreak and its associated lockdowns — though, to be fair, the GAO in January 2020 had only given the JWST a 12 percent chance of getting off the ground by the end of this year — and set a vague “sometime in 2021” timetable for its launch.
NASA
NASA later revised that estimate to a firm “sometime in October 2021,” eventually settling on a Halloween launch window, only to delay it again to late November/early December. Of course, early December quickly became late December, specifically the 22nd, which was then nudged back once again to its current date of December 24th. Actually, make that the 25th.
These delays have been caused by the myriad factors that go into getting an instrument of this size and sensitivity ready for launch. After completing its construction, the JWST had to undergo an exhaustive battery of tests, then be gently loaded into a shipping container and transported to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Once there, the actual task of prepping, fueling, and loading the JWST onto an Ariane 5 rocket took another 55 days.
That timeline was further extended due to an “incident” on November 9th wherein, “a sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band — which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter — caused a vibration throughout the observatory,” per NASA. The Webb’s anomaly review board initiated an additional round of testing to ensure that those vibrations didn’t damage other components or knock anything important out of alignment.
NASA
Now that the telescope has been deemed A-OK, final preparations are underway. Barring any more setbacks, the JWST will launch at 7:20 ET on Christmas Day (watch here live!) to begin its 30-day, 1.5 million kilometer-long journey out the Lagrange 2 where it will spend the net two weeks slowly unfurling its mirrors and sunshield, then begin exploring the depths of the early universe.
