Ramez Naam:

The latest record is an incredibly low bid of 2.42 cents / kwh solar electricity in Abu Dhabi. That is an unsubsidized price.

Let me put that in perspective. The cost of electricity from a new natural gas powerplant in the US is now estimated at 5.6 cents / kwh.  (pdf link) That is _with _historically low natural gas prices in the US, which are far lower than the price of natural gas in the rest of the world.

This new bid in Abu Dhabi is _less than half _the price of electricity from a new natural gas plant.

What’s more, it’s _less than the cost of the fuel _burned in a natural gas plant to make electricity – without even considering the cost of building the plant in the first place.

The solar bid in Abu Dhabi is not just the cheapest solar power contract ever signed – it’s the cheapest contract for electricity ever signed, anywhere on planet earth, using any technology.

Amazing. Puts especially an interesting context on electric cars.

Me at Early Moves:

To get a sense on the cost cutting, here is a good data point: Rocket Internet has lost 37% of its staff over the last months. Down from 1.496 to 937. (via, German)

A holding cutting down its own core organisation like that is as good a canary as any.

At the end of the day, Rocket Internet remains a holding building companies in difficult markets around the globe with no consumer facing scale effects of its own. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is not going to be a winning strategy.1

In fact, the main question investors should raise is wether Rocket Internet even has an overall long-term strategy.

Wired:

The more compelling element of the system is the live view of the world. The lower two thirds of the screen depict the car’s surroundings as seen by the spinning LIDAR system on the roof. When pedestrians cross the street, you can see them. When the car’s following another vehicle, you see it.

It’s not necessary info, but it’s reassuring. You know the way you can watch a human driver and have a good idea of whether she sees that jaywalker up ahead? The screen lets you do the same thing, assuring you know the car is aware of the threat you’ve spotted.

Uber needs to think of the passenger in the back seat. Actually, eventually, every one going into autonomous cars will have to. Uber just is there first. (Not coincidentally.)

John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

The iPhone 7 scores better on both single- and multi-core than any most MacBook Airs ever made, and performs comparably to a 2013 MacBook Pro.

Imagine how powerful the next iPad Pro and the one after that will be.

Few seem to realize the trajectory Apple’s A series chips are on; and, with them, iOS.

Not to far in the future, every current iOS device will beat every even slightly comparably priced device running Windows or Android on every benchmark you can throw at them. That is so remarkable I’d even say it is just plain weird.

(The reasons are scale, integration at just the right stages and having created a place that attracts top talent.)

Ben Thompson at Stratechery (paywall):

This seems so clearly to be the future for Apple: a Watch that does not replace the iPhone, but enhances it with body-sensing and notification capabilities; AirPods that do not replace the iPhone, but enhance it with an always available voice assistant. In a year or two there will probably be an augmented reality product, still with the iPhone as the center. And then one day, perhaps without anyone really noticing, the shift will happen: just as the Mac went from hub to just another device, the iPhone may do the same as all of Apple’s wearables replace its functionality not individually but collectively.

The Watch’s original sin was trying to pull that future forward way too soon, and for trying to do it alone; Apple didn’t build the iPhone as a digital hub, they started with the iPod and ended up here. When and if the Watch reaches its full potential it will follow the same sort of path from focused product to obsoleting supercomputer — or at least one piece of it.

Bruce Houghton at hypebot:

Access Industries has taken control of global music stream Deezer. The move advances the goal of the conglomerate, which also owns Warner Music Group and has made major investments in Songkick ($25M), Shazam ($9M) and in 2013–14 Beats ($120M million), to become an integrated full stack music company.

Someone is trying to build a new kind of music giant.

Joshua Gans at Digitopoly:

If eBooks are seen as competing with physical books, then you are going to worry about the price of eBooks and want them to be priced higher so as to keep up demand for physical books. But if they are not competing, then the analysis can change significantly. In particular, if I am shopping for a gift for someone am I more likely to buy them a book I have read and liked or something else? The point being that if the price of an eBook is reduced in the Summer and that leads to more people buying that book as a gift in November than they are competing but are complements in the market.

This also hits on analyses such as those from Mike Shatzkin. He argues that big publishers are having trouble getting big hits because prices for eBooks are too high. This means that they can’t pick up an unknown author with a good book because no one will shell out $14.99 to read it. For Shatzkin, he argues that eBook prices are kept high so as not to reduce physical book sales. To overcome the ‘discovery’ issue, he suggests having a promotional period for eBooks. However, he argues that is a tough sell as physical booksellers won’t be happy. So publishers don’t try that.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

But here’s why this isn’t really a laughing matter: many of the legacy industry players, including Warner Bros. and the MPAA who represent WB, have been pushing very heavily for a revamp of the DMCA that would include a “notice and staydown” provision – such that once a copyright holder representative sent a notice claiming a work was infringing, platforms would basically be required to block that content from ever appearing again. In response, many of us have pointed out just how bad companies like Warner Bros. are at issuing takedowns, and we’re told that such mistakes are rare. But they’re not rare. We see them all the time. And if notice and staydown were in place, it could create all sorts of problems.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery:

It was a little over one year ago that Tim Cook made what I called an “unfair and unrealistic privacy speech” where he claimed that “morality demands” an approach to privacy that basically delegitimized Google and Facebook’s business models (which Cook also characterized incorrectly). It was easy for Cook to say because Apple’s business model is compatible with a very strict view of privacy, but needless to say Cook didn’t make any allowance for that reality.

One could absolutely argue that Apple is morally wrong here: if they think their value is created in the U.S., then they should be repatrioting their money and paying their taxes, because it’s the right thing to do. That they aren’t shows that Cook’s moralizing only goes as far as what is good for Apple’s bottom line.

For me, I defend Google and Facebook’s advertising model, and I defend Apple’s right to follow the letter of the law in taxes, and I do think they’re getting the short end of the stick from the Europrean Commission. Moreover, I’m hopeful this episode will finally lead to meaningful reform of the U.S. tax code. I do hope, though, that we can get a lot less moralizing along the way.

Very well said. That whole Daily Update on this issue is really good in explaining the situation and precisely the reason I gladly pay Thompson.

Charles Arthur at The Overspill:

In his meta-analysis of the Android-iOS landscape, Benedict Evans estimated that there are 150m–200m Google Android tablets in use, and perhaps another 200m “naked Android” (no Google services) in China. For comparison, he reckons there are about 250m active iPads, of varying sizes.

The key difference is that Apple’s iPad sells for way more than Lenovo’s (or Samsung’s). The ASP for all iPads in the latest quarter was $490, and it has never fallen below $400. Sure, you can argue that the iPad is overpriced, but you can also expect that as long as it keeps selling, Apple will get the profit it needs to encourage it to keep going.

The other point: if you can make a profit selling tablets, you won’t be able to improve them, or market them seriously.

Compare that with Apple’s efforts, where its True Tone screen (on the 9.7in iPad Pro) is likely – certain, really – to come to the new iPhones later this year. But in the tablets first. Lenovo can push – but only because it has the PC division. The tablets, have been dragging it down.