Here are a few of the stories I found interesting to round out the last week of October.
Apple One Subscription Bundle Now Available
The Apple One service that the company announced in September is now available to customers. Apple One allows users to bundle several Apple services together into a single subscription that means only one monthly bill, but also saves money. There are three tiers, the individual, family, and premiere. Individual includes access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50GB of iCloud storage for $16/month. Apple Music and Apple TV+ separately total $16/month, so this does provide some savings. The family plan includes those 4 products, just with iCloud bumped up to 200GB, and allows it to be shared among 6 people for $20/month. For a family with multiple apple devices, this is a very good deal. The Premier plan includes the same features of the family plan, plus access to Apple News+ and the coming Apple Fitness+ service as well as upping the iCloud data to 2TB for $33/month. Fitness+ would be the only reason to subscribe to this, as the cost goes up quite a bit.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/10/30/apple-one-subscription-bundle-now-available-canada/
Waymo Releases Documentation on 21 Months of Self Driving Car Testing
In a rare disclosure of information from a self driving car company, Waymo has published a treasure trove of documentation on its effort to create a fleet of self driving vehicles. Waymo has been testing the system in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and has even begun offering a limited version of an uber like service with a self driving vehicle. The records are fascinating, and shows that the majority of “contact incidents” as Waymo likes to call them, were the fault of the other party.
This is super interesting stuff. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to self driving cars at scale, but I’m interested to keep following this.
NASA Successfully Captures Asteroid Surface Sample
NASA last week pulled off something straight out of science fiction. A spacecraft orbiting an asteroid successfully lowered itself to just above the surface, and used an extended arm to scoop up a surface sample. The system actually worked too well, and the probe picked up so much “dirt” that the container was unable to close properly. NASA quickly stored the sample in the center of the spacecraft before too much of the “dirt” escaped, and now the spacecraft will begin a journey back to earth, where a container with the asteroid surface sample will land in Utah in September of 2023.
Space is cool.
Second Report on Government Attempts to Reduce Wireless Costs Published
The Government of Canada has posed the second report as part of a two year effort to reduce the price of wireless phone plans by 25% for plans with 2GB to 6GB of data. Overall, pricing is down between 8-10% since January, largely due to ongoing promotional pricing which never seems to end.
There are limits to the scope of this effort, as the carriers are all pushing plans with significantly more data in them that fall outside of this focus, but any reducing in pricing is welcome.
The Story of How Nintendo Brought the Nintendo Entertainment System to North America
This highlights a 26 minute video on YouTube of the story of how Nintendo managed to successfully launch the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America just a few years after the video game crash of the early 1908’s. It’s a really interesting story.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/war-stories-how-nintendo-sold-the-nes-to-a-skeptical-country/