Charlotte Henry

Over the last few months, there have been a number of changes in Apple’s top executive team. They include the departure of Angela Ahrendts and Bill Stasior, as well as the promotion AI boss John Giannandrea to the executive team. On their own, most of the moves are only somewhat interesting. When looked at together, they indicate a shift in focus for Apple, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The changes, which can be traced back to last year, have included high-profile hires, noteworthy departures, meaningful promotions and consequential restructurings. They have rattled rank-and-file employees unaccustomed to frequent leadership changes and led Apple to put several projects on hold while new managers are given a chance to reassess priorities, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple’s so-called shift to services, largely prompted by falling iPhone sales, has been much discussed, not least here on TMO. However, there’s a reason for that – it matters, profoundly, to the future of the company. On March 25th a number of services are expected to be unveiled by the company at a special event. Axios reporters Sara Fischer and Ina Fried nicely summed up where the company is in this transition, why it is happening, and what we can expect next.

What started out as cloud storage and extended support contracts, Apples’ “services” revenue sector has expanded to include Apple Music and will soon likely expand further to news, video and gaming. Apple has made an aggressive push into media and entertainment over the past year, which has sparked rumors that it could one day sell a bundled subscription, where consumers could potentially pay one fee for an array of entertainment and media services.

Electric vehicles are getting cheaper. Research suggests that come 2022, they will cost the same as gas-powered vehicles even without government subsidies. However, that does not mean consumers are going to make the decision to go electric. As well as cost, the lack of infrastructure for electric vehicles is a problem. Wired looked into the issues surrounding the adoption of electric vehicles.

If you live in the U.K., Germany, France, the Netherlands, or Norway, an electric car is already a better deal, according to another recent report from the International Council for Clean Transportation. It compared an electric VW Golf to the Golf’s hybrid, gas, and diesel versions over four years, and found that the electric version was cheapest in each of those countries because of subsidies and tax breaks along with the savings in fuel cost. The difference is biggest in Norway, where the electric Golf is 27% cheaper than one running on diesel.

The Apple Store in the Natick Mall, Massachusetts reopened Saturday. It followed 9 months of renovation work. The store is twice the size after Apple took over a JCrew store next to its original site. It features a new Forum, a Video Wall and, of course, the pivoting glass doors. 9to5Mac shared some pictures of the upgraded retail spot.

A brand new Forum, Video Wall, and signature pivoting glass doors welcome shoppers to the new Apple Natick Collection. Natick’s store is the 7th out of 11 stores in Massachusetts to be updated with Apple’s contemporary design language. Like all recent designs, the space is significantly wider than it is deep, opening the storefront to its surrounding environment. In order to increase customer capacity, Apple absorbed a former J.Crew store next door.

Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor or the World Wide Web, has a new, a project. Called Inrupt, it wants to develop a new web structure to put people back in control of their data. Data would be stored on an individual’s “pod” instead of a company’s server. Wired spoke to Sir Tim about the project.

Inrupt aims to drive the development of the Solid platform and transform it from an innovative idea to a viable platform for businesses and consumers. “My group in the CSAIL [Computer Sciences and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory] Lab at MIT had been working on Solid for some years,” Berners-Lee says. “The initial goal of Inrupt is to add the energy and resources of a startup to the open-source efforts to make the Solid movement happen.”

Insurance company Allstate’s purchase of repair firm iCracked Tuesday confirmed its position as a key player in the right to repair movement. Malcolm Owen on AppleInsider commented that the deal could help Allstate speed up device repairs claims process. In the future, customers may only have to be without a phone for hours, not days.

At the same time as bolstering its consumer offerings, acquiring iCracked also makes Allstate a major force in the right to repair movement in the United States, due to its business involving third-party repairs. Repair.org executive director Gay Gordon-Byrne confirmed to Motherboard the outfit has already loaned a lobbyist to assist the push for legislation in New Hampshire. The purchase is already being seen as a positive for the movement, with iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens claiming “I’m optimistic that this partnership will elevate the visibility of the work that we’re doing together.

Amazon announced Thursday it has canceled its plans to build a corporate campus in New York City. The proposal had faced opposition from some unions and lawmakers, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Times reported. In particular, opponents were aggrieved by a proposal from city and state officials to give the company $3 billion incentives package.

It was a remarkable win for insurgent progressive politicians led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose upset victory last year happened to occur in the district where Amazon had planned its site. Her win galvanized the party’s left flank, which mobilized against the deal. As recently as Wednesday, the governor had brokered a meeting between Amazon executives and the union leaders who had been resistant to the deal, according to two people briefed on the sit-down. The meeting ended without any compromise on the part of Amazon, according to the people.

As the rollout of 5G comes ever closer, there has been an increased focus on Chinese firm Huawei’s role in the network. Many Western countries have raised concerns that the company is an arm of the Chinese state and used for spying. This something Huawei has repeatedly denied. Late in 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump was reportedly even considering an executive order that would have banned the use of Huawei equipment, Bloomberg News has a nice roundup of the current state-of-play.

5G isn’t easier to hack than its predecessors, but it will eventually connect many more devices than in the past, so protection from outside malign forces becomes a larger concern. Some nations are worried that Chinese 5G equipment, chips and software could be outfitted to spy on other nations.

NASA confirmed Wednesday that the Mars Rover Opportunity is officially dead. It had been on the Red Planet for a record-breaking 15 years and helped establish the presence of water there. Space.com reflected on the historic craft which, along with its twin, Spirit, launched the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission in summer 2003. Opportunity landed on the planet’s surface in January 2004, a few weeks after Spirit.

Opportunity roamed the Martian surface for nearly a decade and a half, covering more than a marathon’s worth of ground and finding conclusive evidence that the Red Planet hosted large bodies of liquid water in the ancient past. The golf-cart-size rover and its twin, Spirit, also helped bring Mars down to Earth, in the minds of scientists and laypeople alike.