Kids have a knack for messing up a weekend. After, a busy week I’m in the saddle with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s top tech stories: Tesla joins the trillion dollar club, Intel pushes for supercomputer supremacy, and Apple rattles app developers with new privacy tool. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern by tuning into WWNC on the iHeartRadio app.
TESLA JOINS THE WORLD’S MOST EXCLUSIVE CLUB
Yesterday, Hertz announced a $4 billion deal to purchase 100,000 Tesla vehicles for its rental fleet. (Hertz screwed me on a rental yesterday) The deal announcement pushed Tesla’s shares past $1,000 to push it to a $1 trillion market value. That’s TRILLION with a ‘T’. Tesla joins Apple, El Goog, Microsoft, and Amazon as the only trillion dollar valued companies in the world. After the announcement, Elon Musk went on a Twitter rampage urging non-billionaires to speak out against President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion dollar infrastructure plan which is funded by taxing billionaires as he saw his stake in Tesla increase to $230 billion. The Hertz order is the largest ever electric vehicle order by a rental car company.
APPLE’S PRIVACY REPORT APP HITS BETA
Coming soon in iOS15, Apple will be shipping a Privacy Report app which prevents certain websites and apps from tracking users across websites. The app will report which apps and websites are using cookie data to serve you advertisements and allow users to block the activity. The app has caused some consternation with app developers and Apple has blocked Google and Snapchat from launching App Store updates. Furthermore, Facebook and Snapchat have both reported Apple’s new privacy controls have made them miss revenue targets. Apple has been telegraphing the move for increased privacy for a couple of years now. Services that make money primarily off of ads will have to adapt in new ways. Meanwhile, Amazon is applauding the moves.
INTEL WILL SHIP NEW SUPERCOMPUTER WITH MORE FLOPS
Get ready to FLOP! Intel is building a new supercomputer with the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory for AI called the Aurora. The Aurora will be using its latest processor designs to create a $500 million computer that can perform 2 exaFLOPS or 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 (2 quintillion) – calculations per second. If the project is successful, the Aurora (my daughter’s name), will be the world’s fastest supercomputer. This machine will best 2021’s fastest, the Japanese made Fugaku supercomputer which tops out at 442 petaFLOPS. 2 exaFLOPS are 2,000 petaFLOPS for those counting at home. I don’t know why we’re still geeking out about supercomputers, we all know the future is quantum.