Ford and Rivian have abandoned a plan they had to jointly develop an EV together. In an interview with Automotive News, Ford CEO Jim Farley said the automaker will go it alone as it aims to produce 600,000 vehicles per year by the end of 2023.

When the company invested $500 million in Rivian in 2019, the two said they would work together to produce a Ford-branded EV featuring the startup's "skateboard" powertrain. In early 2020, the two, citing the pandemic, canceled a Lincoln-branded EV. At the time, they said they still planned to go forward with an "alternative vehicle" based on Rivian's technology. Now, that project won't go forward either.

"Right now, we have growing confidence in our ability to win in the electric space," Farley told Automotive News. "When you compare today with when we originally made that investment, so much has changed: about our ability, about the brand's direction in both cases, and now it's more certain to us what we have to do."

According to Farley, part of the reason Ford and Rivian decided not to move forward with the project is the complexities of marrying their hardware and software together. The companies say the decision has not affected their relationship.

"As Ford has scaled its own EV strategy and demand for Rivian vehicles has grown, we've mutually decided to focus on our own projects and deliveries," a spokesperson for Rivian told Engadget. "Our relationship with Ford is an important part of our journey, and Ford remains an investor and ally on our shared path to an electrified future."

Activision has delayed the release of Call of Duty Vanguard’s season one update and Warzone Pacific by about a week. The publisher now plans to make both available on December 8th, instead of December 2nd and December 3rd as previously planned. Activision did not provide a reason for the delay. However, it has been mired in controversy this week following an explosive report from The Wall Street Journal on CEO Bobby Kotick and the role he may have played in creating the toxic “frat boy” culture that has seen the company in the news frequently in recent months.

According to a tweet from the official Call of Duty Twitter account, Vanguard’s first seasonal update includes new maps and modes, an update to the game’s Zombies mode and the addition of new gear and weapons for players to earn. Warzone Pacific, meanwhile, adds a map called Caldera to Activision’s popular battle royale. If you own a copy of Vanguard, you’ll get the chance to play the new battleground 24 hours before everyone else.

If you’re a Hulu + Live TV customer, Disney plans to add Disney+ and ESPN+ to your subscription, and you have no choice in the matter. On Friday, the company sent an email to current subscribers informing them of the impending change. Starting on December 21st, all Hulu + Live subscriptions will include access to Disney’s two other streaming platforms. Previously, you could get Hulu + Live TV on its own.

And with the change, the price of Hulu + Live TV plans is increasing by $5 per month for both current and new customers. Come the 21st, the ad-supported tier will cost $69.99 per month, while the “no ads” package will cost $75.99 every 30 days. If you’re a Hulu + Live TV customer with an existing Disney+ and or ESPN+ subscription, those will roll into the new plan.

Disney previously increased the price of its live TV packages in 2020 when they went up by $10 per month. People never like paying more for a service, but the way in which the company is handling this latest price hike may irk some customers. Disney’s latest earnings report may provide some insight into the company’s motivations. In Q4, the company added 2.1 million Disney+ subscribers, far fewer than the 9.4 million Wall Street had expected it to attract. It’s possible Disney anticipates whatever Hulu subscribers it loses will be worth an increase to its Disney+ customer base.

Rockstar Games has apologized for the shoddy quality of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition. It plans to fix "the unexpected technical issues" and improve the three games in the collection.

"We want to sincerely apologize to everyone who has encountered issues playing these games," the publisher said. "The updated versions of these classic games did not launch in a state that meets our own standards of quality, or the standards our fans have come to expect." The first update is scheduled to arrive in the coming days and it will "address a number of issues."

It didn't take long for players to start sharing clips of bugs and glitches on social media after the remastered collection of GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas arrived last week. Digital Foundry took a deep dive into GTA III and found there were "issues that are so blatant and jarring and ridiculous, it's hard to understand how the game made its way through quality control."

What's more, Rockstar pulled the PC version of the bundle soon after launch to "remove some data files that were unintentionally included in the new versions of these games" (those are believed to include files related to the infamous San Andreas "Hot Coffee" mod). The collection was available to buy again a few days later. Rockstar Launcher services were unavailable for over a day too, making the collection and the PC versions of Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online unplayable during that time.

Soon after Rockstar announced the release date for the trilogy in October, it removed the original versions the games from digital storefronts. Now, the classic versions of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas are returning to PC as a bundle on the Rockstar Store. Players who buy the remastered trilogy on PC by June 30th will receive the originals at no extra cost.

Meanwhile, Rockstar has asked everyone to refrain from attacking developers on social media. "We would kindly ask our community to please maintain a respectful and civil discourse around this release as we work through these issues," it said. Grove Street Games, which is behind ports of several other Rockstar titles, worked on these remasters.

Female employees at Tesla’s Fremont factory in California face “rampant sexual harassment,” according to a lawsuit filed on Thursday. In a complaint with the state’s Superior Court in Alameda County, Jessica Barraza, a production associate with Tesla, said she was subjected to “nightmarish” working conditions over the past three years. Barraza’s lawsuit describes a factory floor that looks more like “a crude, archaic construction site or frat house” than the site of advanced EV production.

Barraza’s allegations against Tesla are numerous. In one incident, the suit alleges a male co-worker stuck his leg between her thighs when she went to punch in after a lunch break. Amid the harassment, Barraza says her complaints fell on deaf ears. In one instance, she says a supervisor did nothing when she complained of a co-worker staring at her breasts. “Maybe you shouldn’t wear shirts that draw attention to your chest,” her supervisor told her, according to the suit. Barraza told the man she was “wearing a work shirt provided by Tesla.”

“After almost three years of experiencing all the harassment, it robs your sense of security — it almost dehumanizes you,” Barraza said in an interview with The Washington Post, which was the first outlet to report on the suit. We’ve reached out to Tesla for comment. The company does not typically respond to media requests. 

The suit comes one month after Tesla was ordered by a federal court to pay $137 million to a Black employee who said they were subjected to daily racist abuse at its Fremont factory. “We continue to grow and improve in how we address employee concerns,” the company said at the time. “Occasionally, we’ll get it wrong, and when that happens we should be held accountable.” Tesla is appealing the award.

Tesla also isn’t the only EV-maker accused of fostering a toxic workplace for women. Just days before its IPO, Rivian was sued by Laura Schwab, one of its former executives. In her lawsuit, Schwab alleges the automaker fired her after she complained of a “toxic ‘bro culture’” that saw her excluded from meetings and more. “The culture at Rivian was actually the worst I’ve experienced in over 20 years in the automotive industry,” Schwab said at the time.

The first previews for the Halo Infinite campaign have arrived and it's looking like an exciting step forward for the series. Unfortunately, players will have to wait even longer than expected to play the mode with their friends.

Developer 343 Industries announced in August that Halo Infinite won't have campaign co-op (a stalwart mode in the Halo series) or Forge custom games when it arrives on December 8th. It plans to add campaign co-op when season two starts, which was initially supposed to happen three months after launch, with Forge to follow in season three.

However, 343 Industries revealed this week that season one will run until May. The studio's head of creative, Joseph Staten, confirmed to Eurogamer that means campaign co-op won't arrive until May at the earliest, and Forge will arrive even later.

That'll likely come as a disappointment to fans, but 343 Industries' decision to focus on the campaign and multiplayer might have been the right one. It already delayed Halo Infinite by a year, so getting the two core modes right was critical.

Fortunately, the free-to-play multiplayer component, which 343 Industries surprise launched three weeks early on Monday, is a blast. It's evidently a hit already, too. The mode quickly hit 272,000 concurrent players on Steam, and that's before you include those playing on console, through the PC Xbox app and on cloud gaming. 

Amazon announced a new version of its Halo fitness band at its September hardware event, and now you can lock in a pre-order. Halo View, Amazon's first wearable with a display, is $50 during the pre-order period. It'll typically cost $80.

The device, which will ship sometime in December, comes with a year-long Halo membership. The plan includes workouts and nutrition guidance, and it typically costs $4 per month.

Halo View has a similar design to Fitbit's Charge bands. The AMOLED color screen displays details about your live workouts, activity history, blood oxygen and sleep scores, among other things (some of those features are exclusive to the Halo subscription). You can view text notifications too.

The swim-proof device contains a skin temperature sensor, heart rate monitor and an accelerometer. Amazon claims the battery runs for up to seven days on a single charge, and that it will fully recharge in two hours.

Although Halo View doesn't have a built-in microphone, there is integration with Alexa. If you connect to the voice assistant through the Halo app settings, you can ask an Alexa-enabled device to tell you about your health summary, sleep quality and other information.

Amazon says privacy was a key consideration in how it designed Halo. "There are multiple layers of protections in place to keep data safe and in your control," the company claims. It also pledged not to sell health data that's linked directly to you. You'll have the option to download your health data or delete it from the Halo app at any time too.

Apple does not have a good track record in terms of letting customers repair their hardware. The last decade-plus has seen Apple’s computers become essentially impossible for users to service or upgrade, and the iPhone has always been a locked box. Adventurous owners might follow guides from iFixit to try and do repairs themselves, but it’s a dangerous proposition. Remember, it was just earlier this year, when we discovered that replacing the display on an iPhone 13 would disable Face ID (something Apple eventually made an about face on).

So Apple’s announcement earlier this week that it would start selling parts and tools directly to consumers and offer repair guides was a huge surprise, and a move immediately hailed as a victory for right-to-repair activists. “One of the most visible opponents to repair access is reversing course,” said Nathan Proctor, a senior Right to Repair campaign director at Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG). “Apple’s move shows that what repair advocates have been asking for was always possible.” iFixit was similarly pleased, saying that the move is “exactly the right thing for Apple to be doing.”

Both groups caveated their statements by noting a few catches; PIRG says that Apple’s plans weren’t as comprehensive as the right-to-repair legislation being discussed in more than two dozen states, while iFixit wants to “analyze the legal terms and test the program” before it can say just how much credit Apple deserves. But regardless, it’s still a major about-face. So what led Apple to this move?

Proctor told Engadget in an email exchange that he thinks “combined pressure from consumers, regulators and shareholders has shifted Apple's thinking.” But he was also quick to point out that there was pressure coming from inside Apple itself. “We saw from some leaked emails from 2019 that many inside Apple never wanted to be hostile to repair in the ways that Apple has been at times,” he said. You probably saw that [Apple co-founder Steve] Wozniak called [out] the practices, but leaked emails show internal concern they were doing the wrong thing.”

Apple has made some other movies recently that show that potential government scrutiny and oversight could be driving change at the company. In 2020, Apple finally let users set different browser and email apps as default on the iPhone and iPad, and Siri has gotten smarter about learning your preferences for different music apps when you ask it to play tunes.

While it’s likely that Apple is thinking about government pressure, this change might also simply be part of the company listening to its users and correcting some mistakes it made over the last five years or so. Take the new MacBook Pro, perhaps the biggest “mea culpa” Apple has ever offered; the company reversed its trend of pursuing thin and light design at all costs and instead actually made the both the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros thicker and heavier than their predecessors. The company also added back ports it had previously removed, killed the unpopular Touch Bar, and generally made a laptop that made it seem like they were listening to consumer feedback. The same could be said for its new home repair program.

Regis Duvignau / Reuters

Apple’s move this week can also be seen as an extension of a program the company launched last year, when it started providing parts and training to third-party repair shops that met Apple’s qualifications. Obviously, this isn’t the same as making it easy for anyone to do repairs, but opening up access means the repair landscape for Apple products has changed significantly in the last few years.

However big of a change this new plan is, though, Proctor and PIRG see this as a first step, something Apple will need to keep up and expand to really meet what right-to-repair activists think consumers deserve. “I think Right to Repair knows what it wants, and it will be really hard to convince us to settle for anything less than an open market for repair,” Proctor said. “If they had done this step years ago, maybe we would have to settle, but we have the momentum, and we are going to empower repair as much as we can. I think most legislators agree: this is just one company and a limited program. The floor got raised, but we aren't near the ceiling yet.”

iFixit has a similar view on the situation. “[Apple] pioneered glued-in batteries and proprietary screws, and now they are taking the first steps on a path back to long-lasting, repairable products. iFixit believes that a sustainable, repairable world of technology is possible, and hope that Apple follows up on this commitment to improve their repairability.”

As for what’s to come, it sounds like Apple is committed to making this just a first step. The company said that repair options would initially focus on commonly-repaired modules in the iPhone 12 and 13, like the screen, battery and cameras, but it says that more options will come in the following year. We don’t know if Apple will ever give right-to-repair activists everything they want. It seems unlikely that Apple will make an iPhone where you can just pop it open and drop a new battery in, like the phones of old.

Apple can often be a bellwether for the rest of the industry — just look how quickly other phone-makers dropped their headphone jacks. So, it’s possible we’ll see some other big consumer electronics companies make similar moves. “I think other companies will follow,” Proctor said. He also noted that Google had just released software that lets a replacement display on the Pixel 6 be properly calibrated to work with the in-screen fingerprint sensor.” We see a lot of changes in the works, and we are hopeful we can set a new baseline [for] access to repair.” If that happens, we’ll likely remember Apple’s about-face as a major catalyst for these changes — assuming the company follows through with its new stance and makes it easier for owners to repair a wider variety of its products.

If you're looking for an alternative smartphone to an iPhone, Samsung handset or Pixel, you can't go far wrong with the OnePlus 9 Pro. It has many of the bells and whistles you'd expect from a premium smartphone. Just before Black Friday, you can pick up the OnePlus 9 Pro from the OnePlus website, Amazon or Best Buy for $799, $270 less than the regular price.

We gave the OnePlus Pro 9 a score of 88 in our review, calling it the best OnePlus phone to date. The IP68-rated device has a 6.7-inch, 3,216 x 1,440 screen with brightness of up to 1,300 nits and a 120Hz maximum refresh rate. It includes dual speakers, a microSIM slot and a USB-C port that's compatible with the OnePlus Warp Charge adaptor.

The OnePlus 9 Pro features Hasselblad lenses on the rear, including a 48MP main camera, 50MP ultra-wide camera and 8MP telephoto camera. The array can shoot 8K video at 30fps, but we had reservations about the telephoto lens, which sometimes overexposed images in scenarios with a lot of light.

The device is powered by a Snapdragon 888 processor, which is plenty capable. It comes with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The dual 4,500mAh battery cells should get you a full day of use on a single charge.

The standard OnePlus 9 is on sale too. You can pick it up for $599 at Amazon and Best Buy — $130 off the regular price. It has a slightly smaller 6.5-inch, Full HD display and also runs on a Snapdragon 888 with the same RAM and storage as its larger sibling. Although it too has Hasselblad cameras, the OnePlus 9 has an older 48-megapixel sensor to reduce the cost.

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Once home to most electric scooters in the US, Miami is turning its back on the micromobility vehicles. Per the Miami Herald, city commissioners voted on Thursday to end a multi-year pilot that had allowed companies like Bird and Lime to operate shared scooter rentals within the city’s core. Those companies now have until 5PM on Friday, November 19th, to collect their electric scooters. If they don’t comply in time, the city will impound any remaining vehicles.

“We’re shutting it down,” Commissioner Alex Díaz de la Portilla told the outlet. “That’s it.” Like in many other cities across the US and other parts of the world, electric scooters were a source of controversy in Miami. Supporters claimed they were an effective solution for last-mile travel, while detractors said they made city sidewalks unsafe. It’s that latter point of view that swayed the commission’s vote.

“On Biscayne Boulevard, at whatever hour of the day, you see kids on these scooters,” said Commissioner Díaz de la Portilla. “This is an accident waiting to happen.” Ken Russell, the lone commissioner who voted against ending the program, pointed out it had been a revenue generator for the city. Miami had earned approximately $2.4 million through the pilot program, and it had used that money to fund new bike lanes.

The vote caught the scooter companies off guard. “We’re extremely disappointed in the Commission’s hasty and short-sighted action to end the scooter program, taking away a safe and popular transportation option used by thousands of Miami residents daily and putting dozens of workers out of a job the week before Thanksgiving,” said Caroline Samponaro, vice president of transit, bike and scooter policy at Lyft, in a statement shared with Engadget.

As the Miami Herald points out, there is a chance scooters could return to Miami. City staff are drafting rules that would allow rental companies to bid for a contract to operate in the city as part of a permanent program. But based on the fact the Miami City Commission would need to vote to authorize such a program, it’s not clear if there’s enough support.