Amazon has pledged to be more transparent and to tell its its Flex delivery drivers how much they actually earn, according to an email sent to contractors as seen by the LA Times. Perhaps more importantly, the e-commerce giant will no longer dip into drivers' tips to cover their base pay. LA Timesreported earlier this year that the company used drivers' supplemental earnings to fulfill the $18-to-$25-per-hour base pay they're guaranteed.
The delivery drivers weren't aware of the practice due to the lack of transparency. They weren't told how much of the money they get came from tips, so some of them had to experiment by ordering items themselves to figure out what was going on. Going forward, based on Amazon's email, the company will start sending them a fare breakdown for their shift, showing how much their base pay is and how much tips they got.
Here's a photo sample of the breakdown included in the email to drivers:
"While earnings vary by region and block, with the change to Amazon's minimum contribution, we expect nationwide average earnings for these blocks to increase to more than $27 per hour," the email reportedly read.
Amazon has long been criticized for its lack of driver pay transparency. Back in 2015, a group of Prime Now drivers sued the company, accusing it of withholding tips paid via credit cards. One of the plaintiffs said he had no way of knowing if he was paid right, because he had never seen an accounting of his tips.
DoorDash, another company that's gotten flak for counting tips towards its drivers' base pay, has also changed its tipping policy a month after promising to do so in a win. "Under our new model, every dollar a customer tips will be an extra dollar in their Dasher's pocket," the company's announcement reads. "If you leave a $3 tip on your order, your Dasher will earn an extra $3."
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Apple's popular iPhone 7 produced radiofrequency radiation above the legal limit in a new test, prompting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate the issue.
The cellphone was set to operate at full power and was secured below a tub of clear liquid formulated to mimic human tissue during the test, which was conducted and paid for by The Chicago Tribune inside an accredited lab following federal guidelines. For 18 minutes, a tiny probe measured the radiofrequency radiation the liquid was absorbing from the iPhone 7.
According to the Tribune, the test found radiofrequency radiation "over the legal safety limit and more than double what Apple reported to federal regulators from its own testing."
A customer checks an iPhone 7 in Paris, France.
(Getty Images)
The newspaper tested three more brand new iPhone 7s at full power, and those also measured above the exposure limit. In total, 11 models from four different manufacturers were tested.
The FCC told the Tribune it would conduct its own testing over the next few months.
“We take seriously any claims on non-compliance with the RF (radiofrequency) exposure standards and will be obtaining and testing the subject phones for compliance with FCC rules,” agency spokesman Neil Grace said.
As the Tribune notes, it's not clear whether prolonged exposure to radiofrequency radiation can increase the risk of cancers or cause other harm. With cellphones in wide use around the world, the issue is sure to receive increased scrutiny.
Two phone manufacturers, including Apple, disputed the Tribune's results, saying the lab that the newspaper used does not conduct tests the same way the tech giant does -- although the company did not specify exactly what was different or wrong about the Tribune's tests.
“All iPhone models, including iPhone 7, are fully certified by the FCC and in every other country where iPhone is sold,” Apple's statement to the Tribune said. “After careful review and subsequent validation of all iPhone models tested in the [Tribune] report, we confirmed we are in compliance and meet all applicable … exposure guidelines and limits.”
The tests were conducted by RF Exposure Lab in San Marcos, Calif., which is recognized by the FCC as accredited to test for radiofrequency radiation from electronic devices.
Fox News has reached out to Apple with a request for comment on this story.
The company announced on Thursday the next version of its mobile operating system will be called Android 10. It's currently in public beta and expected to roll out in the next couple of months.
Google has long named its Android software after treats. After its alpha and beta versions, it launched Android Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean, KitKat, Lollipop, Marshmallow, Nougat, Oreo and Pie.
Perhaps the developers struggled with finding a dessert that starts with Q. Some people on Twitter suggested options such as Android "Quarter of a Pound Cake."
But in a blog post on Thursday, Google explained some desserts aren't inclusive of its international community. In many languages, the names translate to words with different letters that don't fit with its alphabetical order sequence.
A spokesperson for Google said 10 refers to Android Q's version number, saying it "felt like the right time to make this change."
"It's even harder for new Android users, who are unfamiliar with the naming convention, to understand if their phone is running the latest version," Google's VP of product management Sameer Samat wrote in the blog post.
Android is currently running on 2.5 billion active devices, Samat said. That includes not only Google Pixel phones, but Samsung, Nokia and many other brands.
The Android logo also got a slight refresh. The green Android mascot only shows the top of its head rather than a full body. The text, which says Android, under the face is now black rather than green.
Pushed by US sanctions, Huawei recently unveiled its in-house operating system, Harmony OS. It was developed to run on pretty much everything—from phones and tablets to cars and computers—but the Chinese tech giant is apparently still weary of deploying it on a smartphone. That is, unless it is forced to do so by a complete Android lockout. Instead, Harmony OS is going to debut on a smartwatch, and perhaps even on a Huawei-branded Smart TV.
"We want to maintain one standard, one ecosystem," Huawei Senior Vice President Vincent Yang said Wednesday at a media event in New York. Yang further added that, when it comes to smartphones, Harmony OS is strictly a Plan B for the company, as per CNET.
This week, the US Commerce Department extended a general license that allows Huawei to continue doing business with US companies, if only temporary. However, if the company is locked out of Android and key Google services, like Maps, and the Play Store, Harmony OS is a backup option. Yang also hinted at an upcoming Huawei flagship—likely the Mate 30 Pro—saying that it will run Android.
The new platform, which was previously referred to as Hongmeng OS, is based on microkernel just like Google's Fuchsia OS. Huawei CEO Richard Yu says claims that this allows Harmony OS to be flexible for deployment across a wide range of categories including smart speakers, automobiles, computers, smartwatches, tablets, and, of course, smartphones. To ensure this compatibility, Huawei has ensured the platform can work with RAM sizes ranging from mere kilobytes to hundreds of gigabytes.
We'd recommend taking the 16% overall performance boost far more seriously than the 41% boost claimed for very specific O365 scenarios.
Intel Corporation
Get ready for a world of pain trying to figure out whether you're getting "the good CPU" or not—the Ice Lake i7 on the left has roughly 3x the graphics performance of the Comet Lake i7.
Intel Corporation
Today, Intel is launching a new series of 14nm notebook CPUs code-named Comet Lake. Going by Intel's numbers, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade to its predecessor Whiskey Lake. The interesting question—and one largely left unanswered by Intel—is why the company has decided to launch a new line of 14nm notebook CPUs less than a month after launching Ice Lake, its first 10nm notebook CPUs.
Both the Comet Lake and Ice Lake notebook CPU lines this month consist of a full range of i3, i5, and i7 mobile CPUs in both high-power (U-series) and low-power (Y-series) variants. This adds up to a total of 19 Intel notebook CPU models released in August, and we expect to see a lot of follow-on confusion. During the briefing call, Intel executives did not want to respond to questions about differentiation between the Comet Lake and Ice Lake lines based on either performance or price, but the technical specs lead us to believe that Ice Lake is likely the far more attractive product line for most users.
A very broad overview of the differences between Ice Lake and Comet Lake notebook CPUs.
Intel Corporation
Comet Lake's CPU lineups offer OEM-configurable TDPs of 15W/25W for the U-series, or 4.5-5.5W/7W/9W for the Y-series.
Intel Corporation
With the exception of the non-configurable 28W i7-1068G7, Ice Lake's U-series runs at 15W/25W and its Y-series at 9W/12W.
Intel Corporation
Intel's U-series CPUs for both Comet Lake and Ice Lake operate at a nominal 15W TDP. Both lines also support a "Config Up" 25W TDP, which can be enabled by OEMs who choose to provide the cooling and battery resources necessary to support it.
Things get more interesting for the lower-powered Y-series—Ice Lake offers 9W/12W configurable TDP, but Comet Lake undercuts that to 7W/9W. This is already a significant drop in power budget, which Comet Lake takes even further by offering a new Config Down TDP, which is either 4.5W or 5.5W, depending on which model you're looking at.
Comet Lake's biggest and meanest i7, the i7-10710U, sports 6 cores and 12 threads at a slightly higher boost clock rate than Ice Lake's 4C/8T i7-1068G7. However, the Comet Lake parts are still using the older UHD graphics chipset—they don't get access to Ice Lake's shiny new Iris+, which offers up to triple the onboard graphics performance. This sharply limits the appeal of the Comet Lake i7 CPUs in any OEM design that doesn't include a separate Nvidia or Radeon GPU—which would in turn bump the real-world power consumption and heat generation of such a system significantly.
Comet Lake's Y-series makes a similar trade-off. Although Comet Lake's Y-series does offer significantly lower power consumption than Ice Lake's, it makes plenty of sacrifices to get there. Its all-core turbo frequencies are typically down about 400 MHz from Ice Lake's, the RAM drops from LPDDR4x-3733 to LPDDR3-2133, and (of course) no Iris+ graphics. We expect this will all add up to Ice Lake's Y-series performing much better than Comet Lake's, at a very obvious, seat-of-the-pants level in otherwise similarly configured systems.
Finally, Comet Lake does not support Intel's Deep Learning Boost, a limited extended instruction set that accelerates AI workloads based on vector neural networks. This extended instruction set was originally available in Cascade Lake series Xeon Scalable processors before moving down to the laptop with Ice Lake.
We're willing to give Comet Lake a pass on this one. Personal-assistant technology in the moderate-to-near future might begin taking advantage of INT8 instructions to significant effect, but for now, we don't think most consumers are likely to miss it.
Intel's press briefing avoided differentiating strongly between Ice Lake and Comet Lake. This lone slide seems to position Ice Lake as the "AI" choice, intimating that Comet Lake is the better general-purpose consumer part. We're not so sure about that.
Intel Corporation
The one thing Ice Lake and Comet Lake really have in common is a focus on Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6. The performance claims for Wi-Fi 6 are, in our opinion, badly overstated.
Intel Corporation
One focus the two product lines share is an enthusiasm for integrated Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6 support. That's probably because neither is built into rival AMD's current lineup. The Wi-Fi 6 support is punched up particularly hard, with an entire slide devoted to glowing claims from Netgear, TP-Link, and Comcast.
It's probably a mistake to get too excited about that Wi-Fi 6 support; independent tests of the current crop of Wi-Fi 6 routers do not support the wild claims of 300% improvements in throughput and latency made on this slide. More importantly, the real promise of Wi-Fi 6 was never single-device throughput in the first place—the real promise of Wi-Fi 6 lies in whole-network efficiency increases. Those increases come with OFDMA, which is described by Netgear itself as the biggest benefit to Wi-Fi 6. Also according to Netgear, the benefits don't kick in until you've got at least four Wi-Fi 6 clients operating simultaneously.
Conclusions
In a world that went straight from Whiskey Lake to Comet Lake, this lineup would look pretty good. But we have trouble seeing a real value for Comet Lake in a market where Ice Lake was just released. The low power consumption of Comet Lake's Y-series is interesting, but the 6C/12T i7-0710U is the only really tempting part of its U-series line—and in both cases, we expect that most consumers would be better served with Ice Lake's much higher-performance graphics and RAM.
This isn't the first time Intel has dropped a confusing mix of notebook CPUs on the market near-simultaneously. Some new eighth-generation Coffee Lake products, for instance, launched after the entire run of ninth-generation Coffee Lake and Whiskey Lake parts had finished. It's tempting to speculate that Intel needed this late Comet Lake 14nm refresh due to production limits on Ice Lake, but it's just as likely that this is simply business as usual in the Intel world.
Assuming pricing is similar, we see the Ice Lake product line as clearly superior to Comet Lake for most consumers. The confusion between the two lines could also represent a field Intel has left ripe for its rival AMD to sweep. Perhaps AMD will even finish the hat trick it began with Ryzen 3000 on the desktop and Epyc Rome in the server room.
As my inner teen squeals at the idea of another Matrix movie (and my outer grown-up winces at what the series might turn into), we look into the true reality of flying cars, offers up impressions from the biggest games from Gamescom in Germany and negotiates the tricky world of laptops for college students.
Sixteen years since the end of the trilogy, Warner Bros. says another movie will be joining theMatrix universe, crucially starring Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss -- Neo and Trinity, if you will. Only one of the Wachowski sisters (Lana) is involved, but she'll direct, co-write and co-produce. The Matrix was ahead of its time when it came to a grab-bag of tech themes -- with some of them arguably even more relevant in 2020.
How will the movie resurrect Trinity? (Sorry, spoilers...) Where does Neo go when the film seemed so resolved at the end of Matrix Revolutions?
Back in May, Google announced it was phasing out its Works With Nest program in favour of a Works With Google Assistant framework. Unfortunately it will "break IFTTT," according to Google. But IFTTT (a service that connects together IoT devices and online services) has some good news: IFTTT applets designed for the Nest Thermostat, Nest Protect and Nest Cam will continue to work after August 31st, when Google plans on shutting down the Works With Nest Program. However, IFTTT's applets won't work at all if users move their Nest accounts to Google accounts. Google has said it's working on a system that will allow IFTTT users to migrate, but whether the company will integrate the comprehensive features that made IFTTT so popular in the first place is another question entirely.
Canon's Australian website appears to have accidentally leaked a pair of important new cameras, the EOS M6 Mark II mirrorless and EOS 90D DSLR. Promo videos for the cameras spotted by Canon Rumors (and quickly pulled by Canon) show impressive specs for the two mid-range models. Both feature all-new 32.5-megapixel APS-C sensors, 4K video at up to 30 fps with 120 fps full HD, and Dual Pixel autofocus with eye detection. The videos don't reveal the release date or the price, but given they came from an official Canon source, we're likely to learn those details soon.
Apple has announced its Apple Card is available to everyone in the US starting today, expanding on the limited launch earlier this month. If you didn't see the many signup tutorial videos provided by Apple, you can apply by opening the Wallet app on your iPhone to start. The full rollout comes alongside an extra benefit for those happy to bank with the tech company: a three percent Daily Cash return offer that works with both Uber and Uber Eats.
"Mark my words. A combination of airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile. But it will come," Henry Ford quipped in 1940. Our dreams of cars capable of taking flight have been around nearly as long as we've had cars themselves, or at least as long as we've endured heavy commute traffic. Yet the prospect of actual commercially available flying automobiles has always seemed to remain just out of reach.
In 2019, more than 70 companies are developing their own personal flying vehicles, with varying degrees of progress. The EHang 184 quadcopter, which made its debut at CES 2016, has already completed a number of test flights but has yet to receive FAA approval to operate in the US while Volocopter's 18-fan aerial vehicle is set to begin trials in Singapore later this year.
In 2019, more than 70 companies are developing their own personal flying vehicles, with varying degrees of progress. The EHang 184 quadcopter, which made its debut at CES 2016, has already completed a number of test flights but has yet to receive FAA approval to operate in the US while Volocopter's 18-fan aerial vehicle is set to begin trials in Singapore later this year. Lilium recently released a new video of its five-passenger electric air taxi, though the vehicle won't be ready until 2025. How long will we actually have to wait?
As always, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a strong business laptop that delivers an excellent keyboard and good performance in an elegant body. Reviews Editor Cherlynn Low says that a handy webcam shutter and a sharper, more colorful display than its predecessors keep this 7th-generation model relevant in today's competitive PC market. Bear in mind, though, that the higher-res screen comes at the expense of battery life, and audio continues to be an issue for the series. Lenovo fans (and keyboard/pointing-stick aficionados) will love this laptop, but competition from Microsoft and Huawei may tempt everyone else.
If you've picked up an OLED TV, you're left with two choices for high-quality sound: a soundbar or large speakers for a home theater setup. Canvas, a new project from a group of audio veterans, is something in between. It's a huge speaker that serves as a stand for LG's OLED TVs, giving you sound quality comparable to bigger Hi-Fi offerings, in a form factor that's still relatively compact. And, based on a brief demo attended by Devindra Hardawar, it sounds incredible.
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