Hasta La Gadget!

Notice Apple that several Apple services are unavailable? You’re not alone. As Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman notes, Apple’s system status page indicates outages across several major services, including the App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, on-device AppleCare, Find My, the iTunes Store, Maps and radio. The alerts note that some users are affected, and that problems may be “intermittent” (the App Store) or lead to slowdowns. We’ve asked Apple for comment.

Apple appears to be recovering. Gurman initially observed problems with the Podcasts app as well as school- and work-oriented services like Apple Business Manager and Schoolwork. Those products had come back online as of this writing, however, and Apple also marked iOS device activation as a “resolved outage.” Corporate and retail systems were reportedly down and have started bouncing back.

This isn’t the first time Apple has dealt with a significant service outage, and it isn’t as severe as in the past. The company grappled with multipleoutages in late 2020, including one on Christmas that may have stemmed from a flood of new users. Still, this isn’t exactly thrilling if you need to grab an app or navigate to a mid-day meeting.

A driver in a rented Tesla caught big air over the weekend, only to plow into two parked cars and several trash bins. Authorities in Los Angeles are after him.

At a time when four-figure smartphones aren’t the exception but the norm, the iPhone SE feels like a strategy shift. A cheaper phone actually can be good.

Apple is experiencing massive technical difficulties, and widespread reports of outages for its various services are flooding the internet.

Read more…

Volkswagen’s electrification efforts in North America will receive an additional $7.1 billion investment over the next five years, the company announced on Monday. 

VW intends to spend that money on “[boosting] its product portfolio, regional R&D and manufacturing capabilities,” per a release, in hopes that doing so will help drive 55 percent of its US sales to be EVs by 2030. The company intends to ramp down its internal combustion production capacity over the same time frame, transitioning American assembly plants to produce the ID.4 in 2022, the ID.Buzz in 2024, and a yet-to-be-released SUV starting in 2026.

The company estimates that 90 percent of the vehicles it sells in North America are already assembled in North America. Its production facilities in Chattanooga, TN have already begun the electrification process with its factories at Pueblo and Silao, Mexico coming online by the middle of the decade.

VW is also betting big on batteries, having already invested more than $2.7 billion in North American supplier partnerships ahead of the ID’4’s launch. The company also plans to officially open its Battery Engineering Lab (BEL) in Chattanooga this May and is considering constructing a battery production plant stateside as well though that’s still in its most initial planning stages.    

These investments are already paying dividends to drivers. During a press event Monday morning, Scott Keogh, President and CEO, Volkswagen Group of America noted that VW intends to bring OTA updates and new software features like plug-and-charge, which automates the transaction portion of recharging on a public station allowing drivers to simply plug in without having to swipe a debit card or fiddle with NFC readers, later this year.