Technology

A bombshell report in The Washington Post today details the ongoing feud between the Trump administration and the US Postal Service, and it provides insight into just how lucrative Amazon’s business is for the agency. According to documents obtained by watchdog group American Oversight, Amazon generated $1.6 billion in profit and $3.9 billion in revenue for the USPS in fiscal year 2019, with the postal service delivering 1.54 billion packages for the e-commerce giant. That represented about 30 percent of Amazon’s total volume last year, and, according to the Post, revenue has increased this year. President Trump has complained for at least the last two years — without citing evidence — that the USPS loses “$1.50 on average for each package” it delivers for Amazon. The president tweeted in ...

Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 graphics card went on sale earlier today, but it seems the new $699 GPU is already sold out pretty much everywhere. In the US, Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and Nvidia’s own website are either listing the card as being out of stock or only with an option to be notified when a card is in stock. Even stock checking sites like NowInStock.net are coming up empty-handed. Across Twitter, reports are popping up of people attempting to buy the card in person and not having much more luck. One user reported people camping outside their local Micro Center for two days to secure one of the store’s stock of just 11 cards. Another posted a picture of people queuing up overnight outside their local store before its manager was forced to inform a queue of “30-40 people” that they could ...

The Mandalorian was one of the first shows to premiere on Disney’s streaming service when it launched in November 2019, and now it’s the reason Disney Plus won its first Emmy awards. The streamer won five Creative Emmys last night for various visual and audio effects seen in a number of Mandalorian episodes. The Mandalorian won awards for Outstanding Special Visual Effects, Outstanding Cinematography for a Single Camera Series, Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series, Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series, and Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Program. The event can be watched on the Creative Arts Emmys website. The Mandalorian was nominated for 19 awards in total, including Outstanding Performance by a Guest Actor (for Giancarlo Esposito’s role a...

Nintendo recently revealed a huge slate of Mario games coming to the Switch (and one Zelda spinoff), but today, the company put the focus on some of the third-party titles that will help fill out the console’s lineup. The event included some big-name publishers like Capcom and Square Enix, though many of the games won’t hit the Switch until next year. If you missed the event, here are the biggest and most interesting reveals. [embedded content] Ori is coming back to the Switch today The gorgeous 2D platformer Ori and the Will of the Wisps is coming to the Switch — and it’ll be available later today. There’s even a gorgeous special edition for those who want a physical version of the game. [embedded content] [embedded content] A lot of Monster Hunter Capcom announced a pair of brand-new Mon...

Facebook is launching a new app to let small business owners manage pages and profiles across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in a blog post Thursday. The app, called Facebook Business Suite, will merge the back end infrastructure of the three apps so small business owners can receive messages from customers, alerts, and notifications in one unified inbox. It plans to add WhatsApp integration in the future, the company confirmed to The Verge. The app will also let small businesses post to Facebook and Instagram at the same time and provide insights about how ad campaigns are performing on the platforms. Much of this cross-posting functionality already is available for admins of Instagram business accounts linked to Facebook Pages Integrating its services h...

Processor is a digest for what’s happening in the world of consumer technology, with incisive analysis (or maybe just jokes) from Dieter Bohn. Sign up for the newsletter here and check out the Processor video series on YouTube. It is a remarkably good time to be into video games. It’s not just that we’ve got new console launches from Microsoft and Sony. It’s also that Nvidia is invigorating PC gaming with new possibilities as it brings 4K performance into a more achievable price range. And it’s that Oculus has released a new, less expensive VR headset. On top of all that, we see game companies beginning to experiment with new pricing models and methods of distribution. Microsoft has bundled its hardware into a subsidy plan with its game streaming service. Apple seems to want to avoid doing...

Evernote used to be the default in note-taking: the fastest, easiest way to keep track of thoughts across devices. Its fall from grace was slow then sudden (as when four executives left in a single month and the firm was declared to be in a “death spiral”), but a recovery of sorts could be on the horizon. This week, Evernote released a completely redesigned app for iOS and says new apps for Android, Windows, Mac will arrive “in the coming weeks.” The new iOS Evernote app is cleaner and simpler to look at than the old one, and comes with a whole bunch of UI changes and new features. There are now real-time search suggestions, easier ways to organize tags, a new formatting toolbar that suggests your most-used options, greater control of checklists, new options for headers and tables to struc...

I’m generally a person who appreciates physical media. I collect vinyl records, buy print books, and like to watch 4K Blu-ray movies. But for a variety of reasons, I switched entirely to buying digital games on each platform as soon as the option became available. Now that Sony and Microsoft have revealed their next-generation consoles in full, a lot more people may well choose to do the same. To recap, yesterday Sony announced the pricing for its upcoming PlayStation 5 — both the regular model and the disc-less Digital Edition. The standard PS5 is $499.99 and the otherwise identical Digital Edition is $399.99, saving you a full $100 if you swear off physical games for good. Microsoft, meanwhile, has gone even further to incentivize digital game purchases and Game Pass subscriptions. The S...

Microsoft revealed its Xbox Series S console last week, aiming to offer more budget-friendly next-gen gaming for $299. The console is specifically targeted at 1440p resolution rather than 4K, leading to some lingering questions and confusion around just how well it will play next-gen games. There are concerns around the GPU performance, memory, and whether the Series S could hold back next-gen gaming. I got a chance to speak with Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, to dig into what’s really going on with the Xbox Series S. The biggest difference between the larger Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, apart from the size and design, is the GPU inside. The Xbox Series S has 4 teraflops of GPU performance, compared to the 12.15 teraflops on the Xbox Series X. The sm...

iRobot has announced a pair of new midrange vacuum cleaners that have some of the perks of its top-range models but a few compromises, too. They are the $599 i3 Plus, which comes with the company’s automatic bin-emptying station, capable of holding 60 days’ worth of dirt, and the plain old $399 i3, which has no emptying station but is otherwise identical. The big drawback for these vacuums compared with iRobot’s pricier models — the i7 Plus and i7 ($799 / $599 with and without automatic emptying) and s9 Plus and s9 ($899 / $1,099, ditto) — is that they don’t include the company’s smart mapping features. This allows the Roombas to map your house so you can tell them to clean specific rooms and even specific areas of specific rooms (like “under the kitchen table” or “under the sofa”). That p...

Nintendo has discontinued every model of the 3DS, according to its Japanese website. The page listings for the New 3DS LL, New 2DS LL, and 2DS are still live, but each product lists “out of production” under its name, and a message on the main page says that the entire series has ended production. It’s not clear when the change was made; several Japanese Twitter users noticed it this afternoon. Nintendo’s US site, meanwhile, appears to have scrubbed all mention of the 3DS sometime in the past few hours. The homepage doesn’t feature the handheld console at all other than a support link all the way at the bottom — under a similar link for the definitely-dead Wii U. Nintendo shipped more than 75 million 3DS consoles worldwide The 3DS was announced in 2010 and released the following year. It s...

Sony is continuing its refresh of its smartphone line to focus on photography and video with the new Xperia 5 II. It’s the smaller sibling of the very tall and weirdly expensive Xperia 1 II, and this newer phone betters it in several regards. It’s cheaper, for one thing, going on sale on September 29th for $949. The other major improvement is that Sony has put in a high-refresh-rate 120Hz panel. Oddly, though, Sony says it’s not shipping until December 4th and even more oddly, it will have 5G but won’t work with the 5G networks in the US — just like the Xperia 1 II. The basic idea of the Xperia 5 II is that it’s a phone with a tall 21:9 screen, but it’s relatively small at 6.1-inches. That sounds big, but since it’s so tall it works out to only about 2.68 inches wide. It’s a much more pock...