Amazon’s new Fresh store in Seattle is an experiment in sustainability

Amazon has incorporated a number of new features and upgrades into its newest Fresh grocery store in Seattle in a bid to secure net-zero carbon certification from the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). One of the first upgrades shoppers will notice when they visit is the free electric vehicle charging stations in the parking lots. Inside, the changes aren’t as visible. The store uses CO2-based refrigerant instead of artificial refrigerant, which Amazon says reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 38 metric tons per year.

Its floor looks like standard concrete, but it actually uses recycled materials from the steel industries. Amazon says doing so reduced the store’s carbon footprint more than any of its other initiatives and lowered the carbon associated with floor manufacturing and installation by 40 percent compared to standard concrete. 

In the kitchen, everything has been electrified. The store is equipped with electric water heaters, electric burners and electric ovens. And, of course, the store is fully powered by renewable energy from Amazon’s projects as part of its efforts towards relying entirely on renewable sources of electricity by 2025. Amazon expects all those changes and measures to save the store nearly 185 tons of CO2e, or Carbon dioxide equivalent, each year. That’s apparently comparable to driving around our planet 18 times in a standard passenger vehicle.

The company will be measuring the real-time impact of all those changes and features using a system built by Amazon Web Services. It plans to apply what it learns from this project into future locations and buildings, so we may see more net-zero carbon Fresh groceries pop up. Seeing as it also recently shifted its retail strategy to focus on groceries, that’s a big possibility.

Kara Hurst, vice president of Worldwide Sustainability at Amazon, said in a statement:

“In order to deliver on our commitments to The Climate Pledge, we must work together across all areas of our business to develop solutions to decarbonize. It’s meaningful progress to open our latest Amazon Fresh Store seeking net-zero carbon certification, and I’m proud of the innovation and technology that the store offers to customers and employees, and for the environment.”

Amazon’s Climate Pledge initiative aims to eliminate the company’s carbon emissions by 2040, and this is one of the avenues it’s exploring in order to achieve that goal. Two years ago, the e-commerce giant also committed $2 billion to companies developing clean energy technology as part the initiative, including firms developing EV charging solutions and alternative fuel. 

The ILFI will be reviewing the Seattle Fresh grocery’s performance data for 12 consecutive months to ensure that the store meets its standards. If the location passes muster, it will be first grocery store to achieve net-zero carbon certification for this particular organization, though it won’t be the first in the world.

Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories can now record up to 60 seconds of video

Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories are available in Spain, Austria and Belgium starting today, and they will also make their way to France on April 14th. In addition to expanding the smart glasses’ availability, Facebook has also introduced new and upcoming features for the device, including the ability to record up to 60 seconds of video. That doubles the previous limit of 30 seconds of video, captured using the dual 5-megapixel cameras on the front of the Stories’ frame. 

We found the glasses’ video quality to be surprisingly good and even very stable when we tested it out. A LED lights up to notify people around you that you’re recording, but the fact that it’s lot easier to start recording videos through the glasses than through a phone has raised privacy concerns from the start. Nevertheless, 60-second recording will roll out with a software update in early April.

To support the smart glasses’ expansion, Facebook View will now be available in French, Spanish, Dutch and German. As the Stories’ companion app, View gives you a way to edit and enhance your shots, as well as to upload them straight to social media websites. Facebook is also giving the glasses the ability to understand voice commands in French and Italian, allowing you to take photos and videos hands-free. And, yes, the device can now deliver audible notifications, such as “low battery” and “full storage” alerts, in those languages. 

Finally, Facebook and Ray-Ban owner Luxottica are unveiling 4 new color and lens combinations for the Stories in early April, bringing the total variations to 28. The smart glasses will be available in their new markets with prices starting at $299/€329.

Foxconn begins resuming factory operations in Shenzhen following COVID-19 outbreak

Foxconn, which is perhaps most known for assembling Apple’s devices in its factories, has partially restarted operations in Shenzhen. The company closed its factories in the city a few days ago after the government imposed new lockdowns and restrictions in an effort to curb the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. According to Bloomberg, two of Foxconn’s campuses in Shenzhen, one of which makes iPhones, won approval to partly restart their operations by adopting a “closed loop” management process.

Shenzhen is one of China’s special economic zones and is known for serving as home to many electronics manufacturers. The tech hub has experienced tremendous economic growth over the past 10 years or so and contributes immensely — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars — to China’s GDP. A long lockdown could lead to considerable economic loss for the country, which is most likely why Shenzhen said it would allow companies to operate, so long as they implement a “factory bubble” approach. 

In this closed loop or factory bubble system, workers would have to live on site and can only travel from company housing to their workplaces. They also have to be tested regularly. Wuhan adopted similar measures when it went under a lockdown that lasted for months at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s also similar to the bubble system used to protect athletes and locals during the Beijing Winter Olympics. 

It’s unclear if the factory shutdowns will have a huge effect on Apple’s production rates, though it’s worth noting that the tech giant has been grappling with supply chain issues and has been struggling to keep up with demand since last year.

‘Elden Ring’ has sold over 12 million copies in 18 days

Bandai Namco expected FromSoftware’s Elden Ring to sell 4 million copies in five weeks. It would’ve been already impressive if that’s what had happened, considering Dark Souls 3sold 3 million copies within a month of its release. Elden Ring, however, eclipsed the company’s expectations: It sold 12 million units worldwide, 1 million of which were sold in Japan alone, within 18 days of its release. The companies have announced the game’s blockbuster sales numbers in a press release and also mentioned the possibility of expanding the IP “beyond the realm of games.” 

According to the announcement, those numbers came from the “distribution figures of the package version and sales figures of the downloadable versions” as of March 14th, 2022. With those sales numbers, Elden Ring smashed a bunch of other records associated with Souls-type games. FromSoftware’s previous release, Sekiro, sold 2 million copies in 10 days, and it took four years for Dark Souls 3, the best-selling game in the series, to reach 10 million units sold worldwide. Based on how well it’s doing, it seems apt to compare Elden Ring to Pokémon Legends Arceus, which sold 6.5 million copies in seven days — and that’s a game from a franchise that already has a massive following. 

FromSoftware developed Elden Ring with help from A Song of Ice and Fire creator George R. R. Martin, who wrote the overarching mythos for the game that features Lovecraftian creatures and dragons. At the helm of the project was Hidetaka Miyazaki, known for creating the notoriously difficult Souls games, as well as directing Bloodborne and Sekiro. It was supposed to be available back in January but was ultimately released on February 25th for the PlayStation 5 and 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC via Steam.

Slack begins suspending accounts in Russia

Several organizations in Russia have found themselves locked out of their Slack accounts without notice, according to Axios. The Salesforce-owned business messaging app has started cutting off Russian users from its platform to comply with international sanctions against the country, as well as with the policies its parent company implemented following the invasion of Ukraine. Axios said it was mostly organizations directly affected by the sanctions that were locked out and that the terms of the restrictions against them require an immediate cutoff.

Since Slack serves as companies’ main internal form of communication and can also be used to share files within organizations, it typically hosts a lot of important data for its customers. The organizations that suddenly lost access to their accounts may have also lost the chance to download their data, unless they’d prepared for the possibility of getting locked out. 

Salesforce published a statement earlier this month that it’s exiting business in Russia, after all. The company said that it has a very small number of customers in the country and that it had already started exiting those relationships the week before. In a statement, Slack told Axios:

“Slack is required to take action to comply with sanctions regulations in the U.S. and other countries where we operate, including in some circumstances suspending accounts without prior notice, as mandated by law. We are in contact with affected customers regarding the impact of these actions on their account status, where permitted by law.”

While Slack isn’t deleting data owned by the Russian customers it suspended, the sanctioned organizations also won’t have access to their data until the sanctions affecting them are lifted.

ARM will reportedly lay off up to 1,000 employees after NVIDIA sale falls through

Up 1,000 ARM employees in the US and the UK will be laid off, according The Telegraph and Bloomberg. Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas reportedly told staff in a memo that the Softbank-owned chipmaker is cutting between 12 to 15 percent of its workforce, with 1,000 being the high end of that range, as part of its efforts to curb spending. The company said in a statement:

“Like any business, ARM is continually reviewing its business plan to ensure the company has the right balance between opportunities and cost discipline. Unfortunately, this process includes proposed redundancies across Arm’s global workforce.”

Softbank was supposed to sell ARM to NVIDIA for a massive deal that was worth $40 billion based on the latter’s stock prices in 2020. If the acquisition had gone through, it would’ve been the largest in the chip sector yet and would’ve been worth around $60 to $80 billion today. The deal collapsed completely in February, however, due to strong opposition by regulators around the world. Industry players, including ARM customers Qualcomm and Microsoft, also voiced their opposition against the deal, citing concerns that NVIDIA might prevent ARM from licensing its chip designs. 

NVIDIA will pay Softbank a break fee of $1.25 billion for the failed purchase, and the Japanese conglomerate will proceed with its backup plan of taking ARM public. Neither of those is enough to keep things running as is, if the UK-based chipmaker is cutting jobs. Bloomberg says, though, that most of the job cuts won’t affect the company’s engineers. Despite the failed acquisition, NVIDIA plans to continue working closely with ARM and will continue to support the company as a licensee. 

Microsoft’s DirectStorage will speed up game loads on Windows 10 and 11

“Windows games can ship with DirectStorage” starting today, Microsoft has announced. DirectStorage is the tech giant’s fast game-loading technology that was introduced with the Xbox Series X and S consoles. In September 2020, Microsoft revealed that it will also make the DirectStorage API available on Windows, allowing games for PCs to take advantage of the technology.

DirectStorage leverages the speed of modern NVMe SSDs, which can deliver multiple gigabytes per second, to load games faster than before. As Microsoft explains, current storage APIs weren’t optimized for modern games’ data loading methods and create bottlenecks that lengthen loading times even for those who have an NVMe SSD. In addition, most gaming assets need to be decompressed before they’re sent to the GPU for rendering. DirectStorage solves those issues by processing multiple I/O requests needed to load assets into batches and by using the best current (and future) decompression technologies.

Microsoft released a developer preview of the technology in mid-2021, but as The Verge reports, there are no available games with DirectStorage support yet. One of the first titles to take advantage of the technology is Square Enix’s Forspoken, which will be released for Windows and the PS5 in October. Other developers may have only just started working on incorporating the technology into their games. It may take a while for more titles to come with DirectStorage, especially since not everyone has upgraded to NVMe SSDs yet. It’s worth noting, though, that while Windows 11 unlocks the technology’s full potential, even gamers on Windows 10 will still see some improvements while playing games that support it. 

The tech giant will present an introduction to DirectStorage at GDC on March 22nd and is expected to give tips and tricks developers can use to get started. Forspoken developer Luminous will also be talking about how it integrated the technology into the game at the same event.

Tesla raises prices across its entire EV lineup

Tesla has raised the prices of its electric vehicles for the second time within the month. After adding $1,000 to some long-range models last week, the automaker has now implemented a much larger price increase across its lineup. As Electrek reports, its prices now start at $46,990 for the base Model 3, $2,000 higher than before. The Model 3 Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive is now $2,500 more expensive at $54,490, and the Performance version now costs $3,000 more at $61,990.

Tesla
Tesla

Meanwhile, Model Y’s prices now start at $62,990, or $2,000 higher than before, for the Long Range version. Tesla has increased the Performance version’s pricing by $3,000, as well, which means it’ll now set you back $67,990. For both Model S options, Tesla has added $5,000 on top of their previous prices, so you’ll have to spend at least $99,990 for one. None of the other EVs got a price increase as big as the Model X, though, which now costs $10,000 more at $114,990.

Although Tesla has quietly raised prices overnight, the move didn’t come out of left field. On Twitter, company chief Elon Musk hinted at the possibility of a price hike. He said both Tesla and SpaceX are seeing “significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials [and] logistics.” He didn’t elaborate, but he linked to an article about commodity prices soaring due to fears over the shortage of raw materials that Russia exports. 

One of the materials affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is nickel, with its prices soaring and more than doubling since the war started. Russia is a key supplier of the metal, which is a critical component of lithium-ion batteries used by Tesla and other EV manufacturers. In addition, Electrek says Tesla is experiencing a massive surge in new orders due to heightened interest in electric vehicles caused by the rise in gas prices.

Samsung’s next Galaxy A Event takes place on March 17th

Samsung has started sending out invitations to the Galaxy A Event, where it will unveil its latest mid-range smartphones under the product line. The tech giant introduced the Galaxy A52 and Galaxy A72 on the same day last year and then launched the A52s, an upgraded version of the A52 with a newer processor, in select regions a few months later. You’ll be able to watch the event on Samsung’s website or the company’s YouTube channel on March 17th, starting at 10AM Eastern time. 

The event comes just over a month after Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S22 series in the first Unpacked event of the year. Along with the S22 and the S22+, the company also unveiled the Galaxy S22 Ultra that represents the consolidation of the Galaxy S and the Note lines. The S22 Ultra has the Note’s rectangular silhouette and onboard slot for its accompanying S Pen, whereas the other models have the traditional look of the previous S line devices. 

Samsung also recently released the Galaxy S21 Fan Edition with a 6.4-inch screen and a slightly more affordable price than its standard counterparts. If we’re talking about phones in the same price range as the Galaxy A line, though, there’s the new iPhone SE that Apple unveiled on March 8th. The new budget-friendly SE model supports 5G connectivity and has an updated chip, but it looks almost identical to its predecessor. It will be available starting on March 18th for $429.

Samsung Galaxy A Event
Samsung

Apple reportedly isn’t planning to release a new 27-inch iMac

Apple discontinued the 27-inch iMac when it launched the Mac Studio and 5K Studio Display, but reports that came out earlier this year suggested that a replacement was in the works. According to 9to5Mac, though, Apple currently has no plans to release an all-in-one iMac bigger than 24 inches in the near future. 

If true, that means we won’t be seeing a 27-inch model powered by an M1 processor — the recently discontinued iMac still uses Intel chips — anytime soon. Apple reportedly has no plans for a larger iMac equipped with an M1 Pro, Max or Ultra, as well. We also likely won’t be seeing one with the M2-powered MacBooks that Apple is expected to launch later this year. 9to5Mac says it got the information from the same source that told the publication about the pro-level Mac Studio and the Studio Display before they were unveiled. 

At the moment, the only iMacs you can get straight from the Apple Store website is the 24-inch model with M1 processor released last year. The publication says the tech giant is developing a new 24-inch all-in-one computer slated to be introduced sometime in 2023. However, similar to the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, it will likely remain one of the company’s (relatively) affordable options and won’t come with its high-end chips.