You can forget about playing Gotham Knights on previous-gen consoles. Alongside a 13-minute gameplay demo (below), WB Games Montreal has revealed that its Batman-adjacent open world game will no longer be released for PS4 or Xbox One. You’ll need a PS5 or Xbox Series X/S to save Gotham City from your living room. The studio said it was cutting the older machines to offer the “best possible gaming experience,” although we wouldn’t be surprised if this helped WB make the game’s October 25th release date.
WB unveiled Gotham Knights in summer 2020, but delayed the game to 2022 less than a year later. The company settled on the October launch this March.
The gameplay demo, meanwhile, offers a good look at the variety you can expect. Each of the four superheroes plays very differently. You might pick Nightwing for acrobatic, melee-focused combat, while Red Hood thrives on his (non-lethal) guns. Crime-solving may rely on anything from straight-up brawling to motorcycle chases and augmented reality sleuthing. Crafting and skill advancement will be useful like they are in so many recent titles. In many ways, this is the DC Comics/WB response to Insomniac’s Spider-Man games — it’s a bid to combine free-roaming action with a meaningful narrative.
Arturia’s V Collection is 9 here, and along with it several new instruments that make it a worthwhile upgrade. And, if you haven’t jumped on the V Collection yet, now might be the ideal time since it’s available at an intro price of $499. For the money…
The Xbox Adaptive Controller was Microsoft’s first real attempt at making accessible hardware. And while it was very well-received, it didn’t really impact non-gamers. Today, the company is launching a new product with a much wider audience: a mouse. The Microsoft Adaptive Mouse kit actually consists of a mouse, attachable tail, hub and button. They’re modular and highly customizable, offering a wide variety of ways for people with different needs to interact with their laptops, tablets or phones.
At the heart of the new Adaptive Mouse kit is, well, the mouse. Because you can insert this into different attachments, it’s sometimes referred to as the core. It’s a tiny square, approximately two inches (50mm) wide, and about as thick as my finger. There’s a scroll wheel between the left and right buttons, and on the underside you’ll find an optical sensor and triggers for Bluetooth and ejecting the back bumper.
I’ll get to the removable piece in a bit but at this point in the demo I was already enamored with the mouse, which I found really easy to use. As someone who suffers from shoulder and neck pain due to a home office setup that’s not ergonomically ideal, I loved the idea of a low-profile mouse that I didn’t have to strain to use.
At the conference table in Microsoft’s new Inclusive Tech Lab, I placed the mouse under my palm and dragged it around. Since it’s so small, I could move it more easily than a traditional mouse by pushing it with my fingers, instead of using my upper arm or forearm. Being able to lay my fingers mostly flat also felt less strenuous on my nerves. I barely had to lift a finger to use it.
Of course, I’m not a professionally trained ergonomist, and there are other issues like elbow angle and table height to take into consideration. I’ll also need to spend more time using the Adaptive mouse to see its long term effects. But the best part about the new kit isn’t the shape of the core, it’s that you can easily customize it to suit your needs.
The second part of the Adaptive Mouse kit is the tail. You can insert the core to this piece, after removing the bumper, and get a larger, more traditional-looking mouse with a curved shape. There’s not much to explain here, except the fact that the thumb support on the bottom is reversible for left-handed or right-handed use.
This is important. You won’t have to go and buy a separate device if you’re left-handed, which would create an othering experience that often happens with assistive tech.
The Adaptive kit becomes a lot more useful with the Hub and Button. The Hub is a rectangular block that’s basically a dock with ports and buttons on it. Along the back are five 3.5mm jacks, while three USB-C ports sit in front, next to a sync button. On the top are a round Bluetooth key and a square button for toggling through up to three profiles. These are shaped differently for easy recognition by touch, and don’t require much force to press.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
The Hub serves as a bridge between various assistive tech switches, and devices like your laptop and phone. Your PC, tablet or phone will recognize these input methods as it would a typical mouse or keyboard.
Possibly the most intriguing component of the Adaptive Mouse kit is the new Button, which you’ll also need to connect to your device via the Hub. Like the core, it’s a 50mm square, but it has eight buttons laid out in a circle. Using a PC, you can program these to perform any task you want. There’s a wide variety of possibilities here: You can map them to scroll up or down, open apps, or enter keyboard shortcuts.
The Button can also handle sequential tasks, so you can have the first push open an app, then have the second tap of the same button enter a phrase, and a third send an email, for example.
At the demo, director of accessible accessories Gabi Michel showed me how to record a sequence of actions. We decided that the macro I wanted to program is to enter the words “I agree to the embargo, please share more” and hit send. In the (non-final) Windows software, Michel started a new macro, named it “Embargo agreement” and chose to record an action. She entered the sentence, inserted a pause (which tells the system to wait for a subsequent button push), then hit the Control and Enter keys on her keyboard, which would send the email in Outlook.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
Some of the commands you can program require the relevant app to be open first, so in this case I’d have to be on Outlook before starting the macro. You can also set things like Alt-Tab or more complicated Adobe keyboard shortcuts that require several buttons to be pressed at once. As someone who frequently uses Photoshop’s Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S shortcut to save images for the web, I can already see the benefits of mapping this combination to one key.
The beauty of the Adaptive Button, though, lies in its customizability. You can twist off the wheel on the top surface and replace it with a joystick or a setup with two semicircles, which Microsoft calls a dual button. With these, people who have limited mobility can hit bigger targets to trigger their macros. The joystick, for example, can be pushed with an elbow or a head, and the eight buttons underneath can be programmed correspondingly.
With the dual button, for instance, the top four inputs can be mapped to one action, while the bottom four can perform another. This is how lead industrial designer for the Adaptive accessories John Helmes has a Button set up for his daughter, who has cerebral palsy. For her, pushing the top and bottom halves trigger up and down scrolling, which is helpful since she doesn’t have the dexterity for a scroll wheel.
The d-pad, dual button and joystick are toppers that Microsoft will offer at launch, but it’s teamed up with 3D printing service Shapeways to give people additional options. At the demo, I saw various designs, including one that looked like a Dyson bladeless fan.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
The 3D-printed pieces don’t just work with the Button — you can create them for the mouse core, too. Hermes said his daughter, who has involuntary movements and light spasms in her hands, uses one with deeper finger grooves on it and a stiffer, grippier texture. This helps to keep her fingers on the buttons.
Michel also showed me some other pieces, like an extended palm rest for the core, covers for scroll wheels and tails with higher arches. Whatever shape might suit you better, it seems as if there is a way to 3D print an attachment that would make the mouse easier to use.
Microsoft may have created its new Adaptive Mouse kit with the disability community in mind, but as is often the case with inclusive design, products that are made to solve problems for a small community can have benefits for a larger population. The Button can make interacting with a phone or laptop easier for people with limited mobility, but it can also simplify the workflow for so many others. Video editors could map common actions to specific buttons, for example, while I would love to actually have a one-button embargo agreement shortcut.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
I applaud Microsoft’s thoughtfulness here, but I still have lingering questions. The Adaptive Mouse, Hub and Button will be available this fall, but many details – including price – are still unclear. Too often, assistive technology is prohibitively priced, and it would be disappointing if Microsoft charged too much of a premium. With the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which launched for $99, it’s more expensive than the Xbox Wireless Controller ($50-$60) but notably cheaper than the premium Elite Controller ($170).
Without knowing the exact price of the Adaptive Mouse kit and the 3D printed pieces, it’s hard to tell how much of an impact it will have. But I do think Microsoft’s continued development of products for people with disabilities is laudable, and will hopefully spur on the rest of the industry. Because fostering more competition and driving prices down will benefit not only the disability community but all of us as well.
Update (at 12:29pm ET): This article previously misstated that the Hub would support Braille display input. It won’t — assistive tech switches that would draw power from the Hub aren’t supported. This story has been corrected to remove that reference.
Intel’s 12th-gen CPUs have already made a strong showing against AMD’s Ryzen 6000 chips, but now Intel is taking things to another level with its “HX” processors. They’re the first notebook 16-core notebook processors on the market, and they’re also completely unlocked and overclockable. Intel is basically aiming to give enthusiasts and content creators the same sort of power and flexibility they expect from desktop chips.
Intel
Perhaps that’s why the HX-series specs seem so familiar. At the high end, there’s the Core i9-12950HX with 16 cores (8 performance and 8 efficient), 24 threads and a maximum turbo speed of 5GHz. For the most part, it looks like Intel has scaled scaled down its 12900K desktop chip to be usable in laptops. And with a boost TDP of a toasty 157-watts (and a base TDP of 55-watts), efficiency clearly isn’t the main focus. The HX chips are powerhouses meant for beefy 15 and 17-inch workstations — don’t even dare ask about battery life.
Performance wise, Intel’s charts show that the HX chips aren’t a huge leap over its mobile H-series processors. The 12900HX offers 64 percent faster multi-threaded performance than the i9-11980HK, but that’s only slightly faster than the 12900HK (scaled figures would make these charts much more useful, to be honest). The HX processors will ship with support for DDR5 and DDR4 overclocking, as well as a new Dynamic Memory Boost feature. They’ll also have “efficient-core clocking” as well as a revamped Intel Extreme Tuning program.
Intel
Intel’s 12th-gen HX series processors will start shipping later this year in large workstations like the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 SE, MSI’s GE77 and 67 Raider, Lenovo’s Legion 7i, HP’s Omen 17 and Gigabyte’s Aorus 17X and 15X.
Now that the latest components from AMD, Intel and Nvidia are available, Lenovo is updating its 16-inch flagship gaming laptop with more lights, better performance and bigger batteries. And after getting a chance to go hands-on with the new Legion 7, I really appreciate that Lenovo made two slightly different versions to suit people’s needs.
First up is the standard Legion 7, which is more of a desktop replacement-style gaming notebook designed to house the most powerful CPUs and GPUs you can put in a laptop right now. It’s available in either Intel/NVIDIA (starting at $2,449) or all-AMD configurations (starting at $2,059), with Lenovo supporting up to a 12th-gen Intel i9 chip and RTX 3080 Ti or Ryzen 9 6900HX and Radeon RX 6850M XT.
While both systems have very similar designs, the Legion 7 Slim (left) weighs about a pound less but lacks support for some of the standard model’s top-end components and most of its RGB lighting.
Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Now those are some beefy specs, but the most important upgrade might be the addition of a new 99.9 WHr battery. That’s the biggest power pack you can put in a laptop while still being able to carry it on a plane. On top of that, while Lenovo’s included power adapter is a bulky 300-watt affair, the Legion 7 also supports USB-C power delivery. That means if you want to travel light, you can pack a smaller USB-PD adapter (up to 135 watts). However, it’s important to remember that if you do so, the laptop won’t charge as fast or get full performance when plugged into the wall.
That said, the most eye-catching part of the system is without a doubt all the RGB lighting scattered across its chassis. You get a light-up logo on its lid, a backlit keyboard with optional per-key adjustability, a big light bar in front and a ton of LEDs in its vents. Now I don’t know if anyone keeps track of stats like this, but the Legion 7 may have the most RGB lighting of any gaming notebook.
Sam Rutherford/Engadget
While it wasn’t ready in time for my hands-on session, Lenovo says it’s also planning to release its new Spectrum app that’s designed to give users more control over lighting effects, including the ability to sync things with whatever music or videos they’re playing.
I’m not sure I love the system’s brushed metal edges, but I have to give some props to Lenovo for including three USB-C ports on the laptop’s left and right sides. This makes it easy to plug in things like thumb drives, while in back, there’s additional connectivity for stuff you don’t need to fiddle with as often such as power, Ethernet, HDMI and more. And alongside a new 1080p webcam (up from 720p), you also get a dedicated electronic shutter slider on the right for increased privacy.
Sam Rutherford/Engadget
In general, the Legion 7’s build quality felt good too. There wasn’t very little flex on its lid or deck, and while touchpads are often an afterthought on gaming laptops, this one is both large and responsive. Unfortunately, there weren’t any games installed, so I wasn’t able to get a sense of its thermals or fan noise. But I do like the laptop’s updated power button, which now has a built-in fingerprint reader.
That said, while I respect a big, high-spec gaming laptop (and anyone who wants to carry one around), weighing in at 5.5 pounds, the Legion 7 isn’t a great pick for frequent travelers. But that’s where the Legion 7 Slim comes in. That’s because while you still get a 16-inch display, support for a 99.9 Whr battery and a very similar design, Lenovo increased the Slim’s portability by reducing its max specs a touch, deleting a lot of RGB lighting and trimming down the size of its chassis. The result is a thinner and lighter 4.5-pound laptop with a smaller hinge that’s easier to toss in a bag.
Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Aside from its size, the biggest difference between the standard Legion 7 and the Legion 7 Slim is that the latter tops out with either an NVIDIA RTX 3070 or an AMD RX 6800S GPU. And unlike its bigger sibling, the Slim’s refresh rate peaks at 165Hz instead of 240Hz. The upside is that with the Intel/NVIDIA version of the Slim starting at $1,589 for a Core i5 chip with an RTX 3050 Ti or just $1,519 for the AMD Advantage model featuring a Ryzen 5 6600H and RX6600S GPU, Lenovo’s slightly smaller system is a lot more affordable.
So regardless of what type of gamer you are, Lenovo is looking to give you a few more choices among 16-inch gaming notebooks. And while I’m curious to see how those huge batteries fare in real life (especially when paired with a power-hungry 12th-gen Intel CPU), I really like what I’ve seen so far.
The Intel/NVIDIA versions of the Legion 7 and Legion 7 Slim will go on sale first sometime later this month, with the AMD Advantage models arriving slightly later in June.
On the north campus of Microsoft’s 500-acre headquarters, anticipation is quietly mounting. The company is gearing up to launch its new Inclusive Tech Lab, which sits in Building 86 — one of 125 buildings in its Redmond, Washington grounds. This 2,000-square-foot room used to be a reception area, with a set of doors leading to the offices within and another pair facing the rest of the world. It only seems fitting, considering what Microsoft envisions this lab to be: a place to welcome members of the disability community, the tech industry and its own designers. Importantly, it’s close to key personnel in Microsoft’s product teams. Across the street is building 88, where you’ll find chief product officer Panos Panay’s office, while down the road is the Hardware Lab in building 87.
On a recent visit to the Inclusive Tech Lab, I met a few members of the team (and Panay briefly dropped in via video chat) ahead of the launch. They were eager to welcome the world into the carefully designed room. “This is an embassy for people with disabilities,” accessibility program manager Solomon Romney said, “it is the connection between the community and our product making teams.”
The new Inclusive Tech Lab is the successor to an earlier version on the West campus that the Xbox team opened in 2017, when it was developing the Adaptive Controller. But that wasn’t a dedicated space. Senior director of hardware accessibility Kris Hunter described it as a “grassroots effort.”
“Some of the team members came together, we built IKEA furniture over the weekend,” she said. “It was just this passion project.” Though that was initially imagined to be an incubator for the Xbox team to work with designers and engineers, it evolved beyond gaming. Over the years, the lab in Studio B on the west campus hosted about 7,000 people, including clothing designers, members of congress and even competitors like Nintendo and PlayStation.
Microsoft
When Hunter was transferred from Xbox to the devices team, she was asked to replicate that experience — this time with a designated space. “Panos came through one day and said, ‘There’s a space over at 86, I think it would be perfect for you guys to show and expand your thinking here,’” she said.
The space at 86 is an open-plan square that’s reminiscent of a child’s playroom. It’s bright and airy, with colorful toys and a giant fiber-optic jellyfish hanging from the ceiling in one corner. The lab is sectioned off into six general areas, including the welcome desk, a sensory stimulation corner, a demo classroom, a faux conference room and a “work and play” area. These are meant to simulate environments in which people use technology, to help product designers and members of the disability community have a basis for discussion and sharing experiences.
For that to be a conducive and welcoming environment for their guests, the Inclusive Tech Lab team had to take many different needs into consideration when designing the space, quite literally, from the ground up.
To start with, the floor of the room is divided into sections with visually distinct patterns and different tactile surfaces like wood and carpet, which makes them easier to tell apart by people using canes. Microsoft’s team was also careful to make sure the borders between them were flat to avoid potential trip hazards. “It took about 12 different attempts to come in and re-level the floor perfectly,” Romney said.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
The lab’s ceilings have felt baffles, and the room uses felt walls that “help suck sound so that we have much clearer audio in here,” Romney explained. “For people who have limited hearing, it’s much easier to hear what’s being said.” It also provides a more comfortable environment for individuals with neurodiversity who might feel overstimulated in a large echoey space.
The light system, which can be controlled by a wall panel or via an app that Romney ran on a Surface Duo, offers dimming and color settings. “This is designed specifically to assist with sensitivities in neurodiverse individuals as well. If there are particular colors that are more soothing or others to be avoided, we can do that in real time,” he said.
He also highlighted the double motorized doors leading into the room. Both doors open automatically when you push a button or wave your hand in front of a nearby motion sensor. “That is the only place in Microsoft that you’re going to find that. It’s something we have been working on for months and months to make that a reality,” Romney said. He pointed out that although some other doors may be ADA-width, people with wheelchairs can still have a hard time fitting through them if they’re carrying bags or bulky items.
The team also made an effort to ensure the bathrooms nearest to the lab could cater to the needs of people with disabilities. Around the corner from the lab is a gender-neutral bathroom that is not only wheelchair-accessible, but also contains the first adult-sized powered changing table on the campus. Romney mentioned that this was a priority after previously encountering cases where visitors had to resort to being changed on the floors of bathrooms. “It was undignified and it was unsanitary,” he said.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
Bearing in mind people who may be moving around with walking aids or reaching out to objects for support, the Inclusive Tech Lab team chose furniture that would not topple over easily. None of the chairs or tables have wheels, although some of the heavier storage benches do. That’s in part because, as Romney explained, the lab is “a living space” that would evolve and adapt as needs arise. The team might move closets around or re-designate the sections, for instance.
For now, though, the six areas in the lab reflect the way our lives are today. The work and play area, specifically, is set up to show a home office, kitchen table and living room. Along the back wall is a desk with a Surface Studio, showing Windows accessibility features for people with low vision. On the kitchen table, the team has laid out not only a Surface Laptop Studio connected to a Braille display and audio scales, but also a mug with a “Say When” sensor that provides audible alerts to prevent overfilling.
“What we showcase here is the best that Microsoft has to offer alongside the best that our partners have to offer,” Romney said. “We rely on a lot of other people to help fill out that ecosystem of accessibility.” Both he and Hunter reiterated that “accessibility is not a competition.” When she was telling me about bringing Nintendo and PlayStation to the lab in Studio B, Hunter said, “we believe that a rising tide floats all boats.”
To the right of the faux dining area is a hypothetical living room, with a couch and a large TV. Here, the team has provided the Xbox Adaptive Controller and setups for one-handed Halo and no-hand Forza. Gaming is the team’s heritage, Romney said, and since the new lab is twice the size of its predecessor, they haven’t had to reduce the footprint of the gaming area at all.
In the classroom space, three tables have been set up facing a Surface Hub. Each desk features different devices with assistive tech built in, including Microsoft’s Surface Adaptive Kit that was released last year. There’s also a Surface Laptop SE with a JCPal keyboard skin that brought increased visibility and tactility to its buttons. In the front row, there are augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices like a Surface Go 3 in a Targus case with speech-generating software as well as a computer with a Tobii eye-detecting sensor connected.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
But the gadgets themselves aren’t the only area of focus. The Inclusive Tech Lab team is aware that it’s set up an “idealized version of a classroom,” clarifying that desks like the ones they’ve chosen aren’t available in all learning institutions. The team has deliberately designed its space this way to “show what is possible when we normalize assistive technology,” Romney explained.
“A lot of times, not just in school but in the workplace as well, when your technology looks so different from everyone else’s, that can be really off-putting,” he added.
That principle applies to the conference room portion of the lab as well, although Romney acknowledged this is an area that is likely to evolve as the team learns more about remote work. Right now, it consists of a long oval table with six chairs set up around it with a screen on a wall behind one end.
Contemplating a hybrid workplace also involves thinking about telepresence robots. For members of the team who live in other countries, the Inclusive Tech Lab also has a robot with a screen and wheels to allow them to “visit.” This helps them “have a physical presence in the space when we’re doing things like inclusive design sprints so that they don’t feel left out,” Romney said.
Finally, in the back left corner of the room, anchored around a giant fiber-optic jellyfish suspended from the ceiling, is the Sensory corner. It’s basically a section that Romney said has “a lot of additional sensory options” like lights, colors, textures and sound for “individuals who need extra stimulation to transition between tasks or focus or to re-center.” Here, the team has placed bean bag chairs with piles of colorful plush toys on them, a pair of approximately six-foot-tall bubbling lava lamps against a wall and a soft green bench with cushions in metallic hues on it. A soft, low-pile rug in Minecraft green spreads across most of this section, for people who might want a soft surface to crawl or lay on.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
The main attraction of this corner, and arguably of the whole lab, is the “jellyfish.” It’s really a domed light fixture with 300 strands of slightly wavy color-changing fiber optics dangling from it in a ring. When Hunter turned down the room’s lights and Romney fired up the so-called tentacles, I got inside the jellyfish and played with the soft, wispy wires.
I’m not one for extra sensory stimulation — if anything I prefer reduced or hypostimulation — but I could see how the experience might be calming for some. The team had set up a makeshift version of this in the old lab, using a hula hoop as the base for the light cables. “We found in the old lab [that] the tactility of touching the strands and the changing lights [gives] a very soothing element to the jellyfish,” Romney said.
Like I said though, hyperstimulation is not for everyone, and the Inclusive Tech Lab team is aware of that. “This is one of the areas that’s probably going to change the most,” Romney said. “This is an area that is new in our understanding, at Microsoft, of how neurodiversity and hardware interact.” But, Romney assured me, the jellyfish would remain.
With this particular section, the team is exploring transitional spaces. Hunter explained that one use for sensory rooms is for children who need a place, before entering a classroom, where they can get calm or get ready to learn. It’s not just for kids, either. People who are neurodiverse or have anxiety could potentially benefit from such transitional spaces, and the team wants to learn more about how to thoughtfully implement them.
Microsoft
To best understand how Microsoft will use its new Inclusive Tech Lab to engage the community, we can look back to what it did in the past. Hunter said that at the old facility in Studio B, the company not only hosted Nintendo and Playstation, but also brought in industry leaders to discuss topics like inclusive clothing, as well as members of Congress to look into building inclusive voting machines. “We believe everyone wins when we can do this as a community,” she said.
That’s one of many, many mantras that members of the team repeated during my time with them. I kept hearing variations of the saying “Solve for the one and extend to the many,” for example, or “Nothing about us without us.” The latter refers to the importance of including and engaging members of the disability community when creating products for them. This is clearly something that’s important to the Inclusive Tech Lab team, who are spread out across Microsoft’s hardware, accessories, Azure and Windows departments. The company also employs people with disabilities and involves them in the design process.
Romney is looking forward to opening the lab. “I imagine I am just going to get swamped with requests,” he said. The challenge, ultimately, is getting the word out. “We have decades of features in Windows, but people don’t know about them,” Romney said. He added that thinking about what conferences to go to, who to reach out to is part of the solution. One of the reasons the new lab is in building 86, he said, was to be closer to the tours conducted in building 87 and potentially be a stop on them to help spread awareness to visitors.
“We believe accessibility isn’t a one and done,” Hunter said. Of all the sayings I heard the lab team repeat, this struck me as the one to leave with. The responsibility of making inclusive design an industry standard doesn’t and shouldn’t lie with Microsoft alone. More companies need to be proactive and persistent in making sure their products don’t leave people out. A dedicated Inclusive Tech Lab may not be the approach for all businesses, but the determined mentality I saw (and in this case manifested as a physical space) is something they should all strive to emulate.
Peloton has posted a heavy quarterly loss for the first quarter, indicating that it has a lot of work to do in order to correct course. The company made a net loss of $757.1 million in the first three months of the year (Q3 of Peloton’s 2022 fiscal year). Not only was that a worse result than expected, it’s a massive decrease from the $8.6 million loss it posted for the same period in 2021.
Revenue dropped from $1.262 billion a year ago to $964 million. Operating expenses, meanwhile, grew by 101 percent year-over year to $920 million. Peloton says those represented 95.4 percent of total revenue for the quarter, compared with 36.3 percent a year earlier.
One of the company’s biggest challenges has been handling its stockpile of connected fitness equipment in the wake of a sales decline as more people return to office life. “We have too much [inventory] for the current run rate of the business, and that inventory has consumed an enormous amount of cash, more than we expected, which has caused us to rethink our capital structure,” CEO Barry McCarthy, who took on the job in February, wrote in a letter to shareholders. “We believe the inventory will sell eventually, so this is primarily a cash flow timing issue, not a structural issue.”
Around the time McCarthy was appointed, Peloton announced it would cut 2,800 jobs, or around 20 percent of the corporate workforce. Rumors swirled in February that the company was an acquisition target for several suitors, with the likes of Amazon and Nike said to be interested.
Although it won’t be easy for the company to get back on track, Peloton at least has a plan to turn things around. It aims to return to positive free cash flow in its 2023 fiscal year.
Last month, it announced an upcoming increase to subscriptions along with price cuts for many of its connected fitness machines. There are several reasons why Peloton is banking more heavily on subscriptions. For one, subscription revenues rose by 55 percent year-over-year to $369.9 million. The company now has 7 million members, and McCarthy has a long-term goal of reaching 100 million. “Our users are highly engaged, and our subscriber churn rate is less than 1 percent, which is the best I’ve seen,” McCarthy, a former Netflix and Spotify executive, said.
McCarthy said the pricing changes could help the company deliver “roughly $40 million of incremental revenue monthly.” The increased cost of the All-Access plan doesn’t kick in until June 1st, but McCarthy says there’s only been a small increase in user attrition and the move will generate an extra $14 million in revenue each month if that level of churn holds.
Cutting prices on some hardware models has led to a 69 percent increase in daily unit sales too. So far, that move has increased revenue by $25 million per month. The company also plans to keep testing a program that will combine an All-Access subscription plan with rentals of its equipment.
McCarthy noted that Peloton is revamping its workforce as it shifts from a hardware- to a software-focused company. The recent job cuts factor into the company’s plan to increase annual run-rate savings to at least $800 million by its 2024 fiscal year. It also signed a binding commitment letter to borrow $750 million in five-year term debt from JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
Meanwhile, Peloton says more than half a million users have tried Lanebreak, its first gamified workout, on Bike and Bike+. The company expects to lean “more into gaming content in response to the success of Lanebreak.”
In a new video, Pillonel describes his latest device as a way to combat the frustration of needing multiple types of cables to charge Apple devices. And after taking a pair of stock AirPods, he was able to successfully switch out Apple’s proprietary Lighting Connector for a USB-C port, allowing him to charge the case and earbuds with the same plug you’d use for an iPad Pro or MacBook.
When asked about the inspiration for his latest gadget hack, Pillonel told Engadget that his reasoning was pretty simple. He said “What Apple products do I use every day, and which ones are still stuck with a Lightning port?” However, switching out the jack on an Apple device isn’t easy, with Pillonel saying it was actually more difficult to create a working AirPods case with USB-C than it was to add a Lightning connector to an Android phone. He said “It was harder because I set high standards for how the finished product needed to look.”
Another challenge was figuring out a way for others to replicate his success on their own devices, with Pillonel planning on making the entire project open source in the near future. “I made it so that [the port] is a brand-new replacement part for the AirPods. You just unplug the old Lightning connector, and you plug in the new USB-C circuit,” he said.
Front the front, you can’t even tell Pillonel’s USB-C AirPods have been modded.
Ken Pillonel
But in the end, it seems the troubles were worth the effort, with Pillonel saying “It is so satisfying to be able to use only one cable and one charger for all my Apple devices. It really is how it should be.” And in a way, that’s sort of the dream: Having one cable that can recharge or send data to any device, regardless of what kind of gadget it is or who made it.
This issue is something the tech industry and governments across the world have been grappling with for a while. However, thanks to a proposal last year from the EU, it seems Europe may be getting closer to making the dream a reality. And his own way, Pillonel is trying to show the benefits of what having a truly universal port might look like in the real world, saying “I believe that the iPhone will be the turning point in the switch to USB-C. If the next iPhone makes the switch, then we can expect all the other accessories to gradually lose the Lightning connector.”
However, one question that remains for Pillonel is, after successfully adding working USB-C ports to the few remaining Apple devices still reliant on a Lightning connector, what’s next on the docket? He noted that because all iPads (aside from the standard 10.2-inch model) have already made the switch to USB-C, it’s not really worth his time to tackle one of Apple’s tablets. He said “I might do a few other USB-C projects, but there is definitely a long list of other modifications I want to attempt!”
In the meantime, for those looking for more info on how to add USB-C to their own AirPods, stay tuned to Pillonel’s YouTube channel for a longer, more in-depth video coming soon.
Russia’s alleged cyberattack campaign against Ukraine appears to have continued up to the very minutes before the invasion. Reutersreports the US, UK and European Union have formally blamed Russia for a large-scale cyberattack that disrupted Viasat’s satellite internet service an hour ahead of the February 24th assault. The hacking efforts permanently destroyed “tens of thousands” of satellite terminals, Viasat said, while the UK noted that the attack affected central European internet users and wind farms in addition to the Ukranian military and some civilian customers.
The accusations come in response to “new UK and US intelligence” linking Russia to the cyberattack, according to the UK’s Foreign Office. Russia hadn’t responded to the claims as of this writing, but has historically denied cyberattacks regardless of evidence.
The hack targeting Viasat likely had its intended effect. Ukraine cybersecurity official Victor Zhora disclosed in March that the anti-satellite effort led to a “huge loss” in communications at the very start of the war. With that said, Ukraine has been better-prepared in at least some instances. It claims to have fended off an attack against an energy provider in April, for example. While this latest attribution won’t dissuade Russia from conducting more attacks, it might signal that Ukraine and its allies are more aware of how to defend themselves online.
The latest 24-inch iMacs can not only add a speedy desktop to your home, but also a pop of color as well. A couple of those vibrant color options are $150 off right now at Amazon, bringing the desktop down to the best price we’ve seen. Both the pink and blue iMacs with an 8-core CPU, a 7-core GPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage are down to $1,150. For the pink model, you’ll see the full discount at checkout once the additional $100 coupon is applied, but the blue model is already listed at $1,150. And if you’d rather get the upgraded model with an 8-core GPU and 512GB of storage, the same color options are down to $1,500, which is $200 off and another record low.
These iMacs make a bold statement in both style and performance. Apple’s M1 chipset provides a noticeable performance boost when compared to previous models, allowing the new desktops can handle everything from spreadsheet work to video editing to Apple Arcade gaming. We also love its 4.5K Retina Display with a 500-nit peak brightness because it makes photos and videos pop. Not only did Apple redesign the iMac to come in multiple fun colors, but the company also made it much thinner and lighter than before, too. Coming in at under 10 pounds, the iMac is pretty easy to move from room to room if need be.
The 24-inch iMac is a solid choice if you want an all-in-one machine that the whole family can use. There are a few drawbacks, of course, namely its lack of vertical screen adjustment and its reliance on two USB-C ports only. If you get the 8-core GPU model, you’ll get two additional USB-C ports as well, but that still means you’ll need a few adapters and dongles to use all of the accessories you may already have. At least all of these iMacs come with a color-matching Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard, so you’ll be able to use those peripherals immediately.
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